then we saw the stars again

So Nine Inch Nails finally made it to Singapore. And after all the years I’ve been trying to see Trent Reznor bring his music in front of his fans, it had to be for the wave goodbye tour… bittersweet, but I’ll take that against not seeing NIN at all.
A little confession: I do not entirely subscribe to the cult of Trent. While I really think he is a peerless producer and creator of sounds and textures, I wouldn’t say that his lyrics mirror every feeling and experience I’ve ever gone through in my life. I do not exactly recognise myself in the voice speaking to me in The Downward Spiral, though I would easily rank that album among my ten favourite records of all time. So let’s just say that I take the whole NIN package with a slight grain of salt, and let’s keep it at that.

Not that this would matter much to the crowd at Fort Canning. After all, it is bands like Nine Inch Nails that enable fans to be thoroughly involved in the music they support, through the internet, through their local fan communities and groups. This idea of identification to a band/brand is fascinating, and few artists right now are more aware of this fact than Trent Reznor.

But brand recognition can ultimately be shallow without substance and artistic vision, especially on a live format. You know it’s going to be your last tour for a (presumably long) while. You know your fans will want to hear the songs they’ve grown up with, the early repertoire, the greatest hits. How do you still have fun with that?

The Wave Goodbye lineup is nothing short of amazing, and that’s a reason why the older songs still sound fresh and new. Since NIN parted ways with their full-time keyboardist last year, the keyboard/piano duties are shared by all members now, and synths were literally everywhere.
Justin Meldal-Johnsen is a great bass player, and much more than that. He played the mini-Moog on many songs from TDS and switched to guitars just as frequently. I remember seeing him with Beck during the Odelay tour, and at the time he was sporting an afro and doing robot moves. With NIN, his stage presence is obviously a little less funky, but he does what the best kind of bass players should do: be the unobtrusive yet indispensable backbone of each song.
Of course, if you are talking about foundations, you’d better have a solid drummer. And Ilan Rubin seems to be made out of an alloy or rubber and titanium. He was unstoppable, and for a show that relied so much on pre-recorded loops and sequences, his ability to keep the beat for 2 hours is just incredible. But the best part was to see him run from the drums to the piano and back for the fills in March of the pigs. Considering how punishing it must be for a drummer to play a song at 260 BPM on a totally irregular time signature, being able to take a break and lay down a sprinkling of piano notes is almost comic relief, in the best silent-movie-era-kind-of-way.

But the main reason why this latest (and last?) incarnation of NIN works so effectively is because of Robin Finck. His versatility as a guitar player is quite unusual these days. He can lay down some brutal chordwork on Terrible Lie or Reptile and bring out the more psychedelic and experimental textures in The Fragile or La mer. On quite a few songs he actually used a heavily effected lap steel to get some incredible tones. And one of the highlights of the whole show was his inspired ending of Piggy. When you play a solo you basically have two options: dazzle the audience technically and take no prisoners, a la Malmsteen, or take your audience to a higher realm of consciousness, a la late 60s. And there is no denying that Finck’s soundscapes were trippy.

So with a band as strong and hard-working as this, the challenge for Trent Reznor would be to match their intensity for a whole 2-hour set. And he clearly was indefatigable, to say the least. I’m not going to ponder whether I prefer skinny Trent or buffed-up Trent, and I find it a bit hilarious that so many reviewers write whole paragraphs on his biceps. The guy is sober, the guy works out, the guy has a life besides being Trent from NIN. End of story.
I’d rather emphasize his proficiency. He literally did not stop for almost two hours, and NEVER even remotely sang out of tune. He is not exactly an effusive showman, but then again you wouldn’t expect him to break into a stand-up comedy routine. So instead, he did what he does best: take you along down the spiral. By the throat.

And that was what the crowd had been waiting for all these years. Like Radiohead, NIN had been one of the great acts eluding Singapore, and at least the promoters chose Fort Canning over the Indoor Stadium for the venue. As an outdoor stage, Fort Canning has an incredible acoustic presence, and provided you have decent sound engineers, the sound will be ideal: loud but never deafening, bass heavy but not absurdly gut-churning, and no metal or concrete structures to send your high frequencies into freakout mode. More than anything, I was impressed by the crystalline quality of the silence in-between chords, something that makes somewhat damaged such a visceral experience on disc, and an even more thrilling one live. And for the bands who believe that white lights are so last century, well, they can go back to the drawing board. The colour doesn’t matter: it’s the number of spotlights! And what you do with them…

So why don’t I feel like I’ve just seen the best show in my life?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about anything. If you are merely calculating how much bang you get for your buck, well, you got a lot of bang, for sure. But I never really take material concerns into the equation. All I can say is that I saw one of the tightest bands play songs from a repertoire spanning 20 years. And maybe that’s what I ultimately found slightly underwhelming. It was a farewell tour, not an album tour. It’s very different when you’re watching Radiohead support OK computer as opposed to them showcasing songs from yet-to-be-published Kid A, and NIN shows are just the same. I really like the Beside you in time DVD because it represented the vision and continuation of With Teeth, and that’s the album I can identify with the most.
A farewell tour will ultimately feel like a greatest hits showcase, and to a certain extent a performance by-the-numbers. And though it is impossible to fault the band, you know the stakes just aren’t the same when you know you are waving goodbye.