Since their 1989 debut, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has been rock’s self-loathing and self-effacing outsider. The one-man pretty hate machine has crafted a sound and career molded out of doomsday metal angst, leather-clad synth drumbeats, and funeral parlour misery in the style best reflective of an industrial gothic paradise.
His voice and technocratic wizardry are built upon an empire of dirt that has been the source for his tortured soul to seek industrial music’s haunting salvation. And last Thursday night, the Air Canada Centre played the role of Reznor’s cathedral for the sonically decayed and emotionally embattled.
Accompanied by his ever-evolving lineup of black-clad misfits, Reznor took the stage to a mind-numbing array of NASA-style lighting that suggested not so much an industrial metal altar, but rather a tech-pop circus. Their stage show reflected none of the latter, however, as the Nails lathered the crowd into a frenzy from the opening riff of “Pinion” to the last disgruntled chord of “Head Like a Hole” in a myriad of lacerating guitars, techno boom, and sonic dissonance.
The rehabilitated Reznor, emotionally and physically sound, still struck the same painful musical chords, though-opening with the laser-blazing guitar tease of “Pinion,” Reznor and crew attacked the stage, guitarist Aaron North swinging his axe like a weapon, generating fierce decibels of feedback, while Rezno cried out signature lines like, “You make this all go away,” and “This is what it feels like.” Clearly Reznor the Revived still has enough emotional angst left to ravage his band and his audience with his mountains of sorrow for two hours straight.
The band played with almost computer-like precision, but without the emotional void that suggests. In fact, the emotional void was left to the sold-out crowd-taking in classics like psycho-sex thriller “Closer” and the nihilist tantrum of “March of the Pigs,” the crowd seemed to be its own state of self-loathing. Possibly loathing for the bygone days of The Downward Spiral era in which Reznor and Co. had not fallen victim to industrial music’s more pop-savvy side. Or the void could have been attributed to the Air Canada Centre, a venue not all that conducive to the genre’s dark noise.
Despite the mopey audience, Reznor certainly seemed pleased that Toronto still embraces his music, as he paid thanks to the city for selling out the show in seven minutes (“the fastest on the tour”). He then introduced a Joy Division cover, “Dead Souls”-befitting his band’s sombre inspiration, perhaps, but it’s good to see that creatively, Reznor is anything but dead.
