10.30.2018

Live and Cold and Black and Infinite - Four Nights of NIN in NYC

Highlights

I bitch...so...hard...about Nine Inch Nails. I believe I've explained before that the reason I bitch so hard is because I know what Trent Reznor is capable of and, when he doesn't live up to the standards that he himself has set, I get disappointedIt doesn't come from a place of anger, it comes from a place of confusion. "Trent...you did such great things here, why aren't you doing great things here?"
That is why, when I saw NIN back in 2014 back-to-back and they performed the same set on both nights, I bitched. Hard.
Three years and two EPs later, they played Panorama and then a secret show at Webster Hall, again, back-to-back. Although the sets were different from one another, I still recall one of my favorite moments being that, on that second night, they didn't play "The Hand That Feeds". Again: one of my favorite moments of seeing Nine Inch Nails live...was the absence of a song. That is not right.
A year and one more EP* after that, NIN set out on their Cold and Black and Infinite tour. Right before that though, they did a small run of festival shows with a pretty standard set, except for three tracks off the new EP to spice things up.
Based on that festival run, the fact that they were playing for festival crowds and not "real" Nine Inch Nails fans, the fact that it wasn't a named tour, and the "Physical World" pre-sale event, I knew there would be something special about CBI. I did not know what and that's how I liked it.
At the aforementioned pre-sale event, Chris and I bought tickets to both shows at Radio City Music Hall. When the band announced two more back-to-back nights at Brooklyn's Kings Theatre, I decided to go for the second night and easily scored GA tickets. After that second Radio City Music Hall show, we debated and then bought tickets to the third show, thus setting ourselves up for four Nine Inch Nails shows in five days.
As I've already reviewed each night individually (see below), I'll just list some things I'll never forget.
  • I saw "The Perfect Drug", my hands-down favorite Nine Inch Nails song, live, twice, played exactly as it should be, with a drummer who can hit every single beat and somehow find a way to instill the track with even more energy.
  • I was lucky enough to see "Now I'm Nothing" transition into "Terrible Lie"**
  • I heard all of Broken, a formative album for me, played front to back, including the cheeky hidden tracks.
  • Additional highlights included: "Mr. Self Destruct", "This Isn't The Place", two thirds of Bad Witch, "Gave Up" (not that unique, but they fucking brought it this time around), "All The Love In The World", TDTWWA, "Burn", "La Mer", "The Becoming", "Burning Bright (Field On Fire)", "Happiness In Slavery", "Find My Way", "I Do Not Want This". "Parasite", "The Background World"
I'm sure the next thing from Reznor will let me down in some way, because that's who I am, but I'm going to keep this experience with me. I walked out of each night completely satisfied and genuinely excited at what was coming next. Did I leave at the start of "Hurt" on those final two nights? Yes. Because a. I've seen it at every Nine Inch Nails show but one, and b. Kings Theatre is fucking MILES from my home and getting a car when there's 5000 people out front as opposed to 20 is a lot harder.*** Aside from that, yeah, these shows were something special. Even if everything is lazy and boring and triple H from here on out, these shows happened and I was there.

Here are reviews from the specific nights of the tour, along with links to photo and video galleries.

Radio City Music Hall [Night 1]
Radio City Music Hall [Night 2]
Kings Theatre [Night 1]
Kings Theatre [Night 2]


Bad Witch is an EP. Stop. Shut up. It is.

** The only downside being that I can never hear TL again without that intro.

*** Although I did feel like a parent sneaking out of his kid's school play for some really odd reason...

10.23.2018

A review of Thom Yorke's "Suspiria" score


I compare Thom Yorke to Trent Reznor all the time. And if you don’t, then I kind of don’t think you’re into either them or their stuff. So, when it was announced that Yorke was scoring his first film, I immediately thought of Reznor’s first outing with The Social Network and how well he and it did. 

Headline: Reznor’s first score is better than Yorke's first score.


Side A
1. A Storm That Took Everything - The hungry, howling dissonance of the void.

2. The Hooks -  Spare, sinister piano, then lush orchestration. All underscoring a wet, brutal crime.

3. Suspirium - Inexplicable sorrow and beauty.

4. Belonging Thrown in a River - Horror movie strings, tension.

5. Has Ended - Psychedelic unease, overtones of totalitarianism.

6. Klemperer Walks - sick regality

7. Open Again - Cultist celebration


Said B
8. Sabbath Invocation - Mass

9. The Inevitable Pull - Deep, unsettling, navigating a dark space filled with monsters. More sparse piano.

10. Olga’s Destruction - Nervous piano bouncing off tiled walls and long shards of glass. Feels like a broken music box.

11. The Conjuring of Anke - Haunted mansion piano, complete with choir of ghosts

12. A Light Green - First overtly electronic moment. Alien, jarringly inirganic.

13. Unmade - Clear, bright, choral. 

14. The Jumps  - Soft, with some disturbance. Warm, touch of Badalamenti. Another warm, round synth feel


Side C
15. Volk - Sharp, stabs of panic. Inorganic disease. When the drums come in things just get more confusing. Some classic 70’s horror movie vibes.

16. The Universe Is Indifferent - Same session as "Has Ended" perhaps. Has some of the same feel.

17. The Balance of Things - Balance is maintained only for a moment before things slide over the edge into the darkness.

18. A Soft Hand Across Your Face - More Badalamenti vibes.

19. Suspirium Finale - a fuller exploration of the original.


Side D
20. A Choir of One - long, uncomfortable drone. Hypnotic but not very interesting.

21. Synthesizer Speaks - Last gasps of talking computer. The end is truly unsettling, like...turn this off, it's freaking me the fuck out.

22. Room of Compartments - rising choir of screams. This is perfect for Suspiria.

23. An Audition - frantic pursuit

24. Voiceless Terror - More mangled, manipulated screams. Horrifying.

25. The Epilogue - based on the sick, dead sound of this, no one made it out.


There's no sense of unification or flow here and everything feels scattered. Whether or not this was intentional and made to fit with the chaotic, nightmare feel of the film...I don't know. Because I haven't seen it yet. Again, comparing it to Reznor's work on TSN*, it's more swirls of sound and color, swaths and patches, with the occasional clear picture included. Personally, I love "Suspirium" and "Suspirium Finale", and side D is a lot of really solid and terrifying sound manipulation, but that's all I took with me. The rest is fine. It's...just fine. It's less traditional than I was expecting from Yorke, which is fucking saying something. It's also a letdown for me. I think Yorke's non-Radiohead stuff is his best work**, and thought this was going to be a triumph from front to back.

There were three things I was certain of when I first saw Yorke was set to score Suspiria. First, that it would be a challenging listen but, overall, rewarding, second, that it would be startlingly unique, and third, that it would stand out among all other scores, let alone the stagnant swamp of all those shitty bland horror scores out there and launch a Reznor-esque side career in film scoring. There’s no way to be sure of that third one until some time goes by, but I was wrong about the first one, and (kinda) right about the second one. There are a few truly brilliant moments, but not enough to make up for the featureless ones. 
Looking forward to whatever Thom Yorke does next.

* Yeah, I know that's not really how things are done, but I am going to continue to do this.

** Save for maybe two dozen absolutely perfect Radiohead creations.

10.20.2018

Cold and Black and Infinite North America 2018 - Nine Inch Nails @ Kings Theatre [Night 2]

Well, I just saw Nine Inch Nails play all of Broken in sequence. If that weren’t enough, they whipped out their cover of How To Destroy Angels’ “Parasite”, “Me, I’m Not” from Year Zero, and “The Background World”, the phenomenal closer from last year’s Add Violence. Somehow, after three unique and surprising sets, Trent motherfucking Reznor keeps things interesting. In four nights, I witnessed Nine Inch Nails play 53 unique songs, including over a dozen I’d never seen performed live, one of which, “The Perfect Drug”, has been my favorite song of theirs since its release over twenty years ago.
Back in 2009, NIN opened for Jane’s Addiction on the NIN|JA tour, then, deciding things were a bit too restricted between shortened set times and the daylight sapping the drama from their performances, they embarked on their Wave Goodbye tour. As far as production and spectacle, this was their most attic set of shows. There were no elaborate lighting rigs or interactive LED panels…not even a scrim on which to project abstract colors and shapes: just the band and an insane rotation of songs. Catching them four times in three months, I saw most of The Slip, a good chunk of The Fragile, and almost all of The Downward Spiral, but the four nights of the Cold and Black and Infinite tour blew those away. The depth of the deep cuts, the breadth of the material covered was literally astonishing at times. The only sure thing every night was “Head Like A Hole” denoting the end of the first set and “Hurt” closing things out*.
The only complaint any true fan of Nine Inch Nails could have about this tour is that they didn’t see enough of it. As I said when Bad Witch came out earlier this year, if Reznor did decide to call it quits after that album and after this tour, I could not be more satisfied with what he’s done and with what I’ve seen.

* Or intimating it was safe to leave if anyone wanted to beat the traffic.

Cold and Black and Infinite North America 2018 - Nine Inch Nails @ Kings Theatre [Night 1]

There’s something to be said for collecting. I’m not a collector in the sense that I obtain things, keep them in their wrapping, and never touch them again. I don’t go to conventions to trade my unwrapped things for other people’s unwrapped things, but there is a part of me that yearns for completion. In that sense, I enjoy the idea of “collecting” an album's live performance, in other words, hearing all of the songs on an album played live; not all in one night or in order, but over the years. That was one of my reasons for seeing Nine Inch Nails at all four of their New York shows. There’s also the fact that, while Trent Reznor recently said he’s not planning on quitting music any time soon, life’s too fucking short and why would I not see Nine Inch Nails four nights in a five day period?
Plus…I needed to see “The Perfect Drug” again. I was not ready the first time.
Even though this was the first of their two Brooklyn shows, Reznor treated it as the third in a series of four, playing eight songs not heard at the two previous shows, including two tour debuts (“I Do Not Want This”* and “Something I Can Never Have” from 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine). Over the course of this third performance, the band played half of their debut album (if you count the little “The Only Time” interpolation in “Closer”), a Gary Numan cover (“Metal”), and opened with a rare gem, “Now I’m Nothing”, which was composed and performed for their 1993 Lollapalooza stint. This particular show opener, “Now I’m Nothing” into “Terrible Lie”, has only been performed live on two other tours, 2009’s Wave Goodbye and this current tour. It might be the most powerful opening number in their repertoire and I actually consider it a sort of honor to have witnessed it live.
After this, there was to be one, final New York show. I was convinced there was nothing left to shock me, but Trent Reznor has fooled me before.

* The introduction of this into the tour’s rotation along with nine other tracks from the album indicates that another full performance of The Downward Spiral is imminent, perhaps during the band’s six night run at the Palladium in Los Angeles at the end of the year.

A review of John Grant's "Love Is Magic"

John Grant has the market cornered when it comes to snarky catharsis.* He’s also pretty great at obliterating one’s heart with a sledgehammer in one song and then eliciting snorts of laughter in the next. Love Is Magic is dense, consisting of ten tracks clocking in at just under an hour. On one hand, it could be argued that Grant lets things unfold, not rushing, allowing the listener to feel everything he set out for them to feel. On the other hand…does, everysong here have to be as long as it is? I believe that decision will come down to how much each individual listener enjoys synthesizers.
The event begins with “Metamorphosis"; fat, springy synths accompanied by seemingly random lyrics (“14-year old boy rapes 80-year old man/tickets to the Met/sweet corn from a can/baby's in the whitest house playing with his toys/earthquakes forest fires/hot Brazilian boys/67 yogurt flavors which one do you want?/can’t decide on toothpaste/Immanuel Kant) which then dissolve into a dark, uneasy interlude where context is given as Grant sings "as I enjoy distraction/she just slipped away/it didn’t seem to matter/how much she had prayed/they took her in an ambulance/and that is where she died/and still unto this very day/I don’t think I have cried”. Then, it’s back to the almost Oingo Boingo vibe as he continues his list.

Fuck me, that’s just the first five minutes and change of the album.
But it’s not all gloom and doom: ”Preppy Boy” is a cheeky, straightforward romp about offering to fuck a preppy dude who may or may not know he’s gay (come on now, preppy boy/if you’ve got an opening then I am unemployed/I’m so sick and tired of waiting in line/call me up if you’re down and you got the time), “Smug Cunt” is about…a smug cunt, absolutely dripping with Grant’s acidic vitriol, and while it maybe goes on a bit long (this horse is beaten, dead, buried, exhumed, and shat on) it’s enjoyably sharp the whole time. There are also heartwarming/heartwrenching moments like “Is He Strange” and the closer “Touch and Go”. The big winner on Love Is Magic, however, is “Diet Gum”. I’m not even going to address it, just listen and enjoy.
And, of course, everything is delivered in Grant's signature decadent purr…it’s like being wrapped in warm towels…
While maybe not as tight as 2015’s Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, Grant continues to deepen and widen both our smiles and the gashes he’s carved into our hearts.
*...snatharsis...?

A review of St. Vincent's "MassEducation"


There’s no truer test of a song’s quality than to hear it with all its production stripped away. So much music today is its bells and whistles and samples and so on. But it all comes down to the bones. That is what MassEducation is: no harmonies, no insanely talented and effect-buffed guitar playing, no dozens of takes to get that perfect sound, just Annie Clark's voice, Thomas Bartlett’s piano, and Pat Dillett’s subtle yet integral production lending a sense of continuity.
As this new release is a reinterpretation of last year’s stellar Masseduction, I’m just going to break the former down versus the latter.
"Slow Disco" - feels like the impetus for this whole thing and it’s perfect. This is the fifth iteration, also known as “Slow Slow Disco”, as opposed to “Fast Slow Disco” which was released earlier this year. This was a favorite from Masseduction.
"Savior" - Clark brandishes her voice like a glass sword. Absolutely beautiful and naked and fire. Great juxtaposition between the high piano and plucked low notes.
The repetition and layered vocals from the original version of “Masseduction" lose something here and this feels a bit harried at times.
“Sugarboy" - stripped of its frantic, coked-up, clubby chaos, we see those bones and realize there is much more to this than originally indicated. Bartlett’s piano is indispensable in making this work as well as it does. The moment towards the end where Clark makes herself laugh is wonderful.
"Fear The Future" - sounds so triumphant and timeless in this arrangement, again, thanks to Bartlett’s shimmering high notes.
Without those huge, swelling noises in the background and the massive, thudding drums “Smoking Section” feels so much more vulnerable. Originally, when Clark declared “it’s not the end”, there was a sense of certainty, but here, she plays the role of the unreliable narrator.
"Los Ageless” becomes a low key, jazz number that wouldn’t be out of place in a smoky speakeasy from the 20’s. Almost a total reworking. This arrangement is reminiscent of something by Tori Amos, which makes me want a Love This Giant-type collaboration immediately.
“New York” gains added fragility, taking on a more sorrowful tone.
“Young Lover”, one of the only tracks to get a tempo shift, loses a little something, but that’s really one of this album's only shortcomings.
“Happy Birthday, Johnny” loses its gentle bed of slide guitars and gains an absolutely gorgeous piano break. Perhaps one of the only tracks here better than the original.
I was really curious how this would go…but, thanks to that slightly detuned, demented plucked piano, “Pills” works just fine. Somehow the relatively fast vocals work here where they didn’t on “Masseduction”. Another appearance of Bartlett’s sparkling high notes seals the deal.
"Hang On Me" is an excellent closer. It’s even more perfect in this state than in its original presentation.

While Jack Antonoff’s production lent Masseduction a dynamic, immediate quality, the versions presented here feel more ageless and weighty, even those that actually sound lighter than the originals, probably because there’s less to distract from the melodies and lyrics. Not that there was really any doubt, but MassEducation further cements Clark’s songcrafting skills. For those who didn’t like the instrumentation or presentation of her last album, or for those who loved it but would appreciate a deeper, more intimate look at the album, or simply for people who like the work of a strong, female singer/songwriter to accentuate the vibe of the season, MassEducation is meant for you.

10.18.2018

Cold and Black and Infinite North America 2018 - Nine Inch Nails @ Radio City Music Hall [Night 2]

Back in May, when tickets for Nine Inch Nails’ Cold And Black And Infinite tour went on sale only at the box offices of the venues where the handful of shows were being held, there was a poster for sale listing the locations of this so-called “Physical World” pre-sale event. Last month, once the tour had started, there was a different poster available at the shows. When the two posters were laid next to one another, it completed a larger image; it turned out each poster was only half of the full picture. The second night of Nine Inch Nails at Radio City Music Hall was that second half. Between the two shows, only three songs were repeated, all the rest were unique to that evening’s performance. And, like the first night, Trent Reznor did not seem to give the slightest of fucks about the more radio friendly audience members.
While the first night included two thirds of their latest release, Bad Witch, and half of the release before that, as well as some never-before-played* songs such as “All The Love In The World” from With Teeth and “The Perfect Drug” from 1997’s Lost Highway soundtrack, this second evening focused more on The Fragile (the beginning of the show was the first four tracks of that album in sequence), The Downward Spiral (including a blistering rendition of “The Becoming”), and Year Zero. The chaotic ending of “The Great Destroyer” has been retooled to include garbled bits of the current American president's already garbled voice, adding a real chill and sense of impending doom to the performance. As before, there was a handful of unique moments, namely the reappearance of “La Mer” which hasn’t been played in full, in almost a decade, a rare and heartfelt cover of Bowie’s “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, and a transition from “Help Me I Am In Hell” to the explosive and obliterating “Happiness In Slavery”, which hasn’t been played live in almost 25 years.
“This is a weird set, huh?” asked Reznor at one point. “Well, it just felt right”.
No complaints here, Trent. None.

Nine Inch Nails are playing two more nights in New York at Brooklyn's Kings Theater.
I will be there.


Photo/video gallery
* Never before this tour.

Cold and Black and Infinite North America 2018 - Nine Inch Nails @ Radio City Music Hall [Night 1]

The looks on the faces of every single person who was there expecting a typical Nine Inch Nails show…*
Oh goodness but the delight was just as creamy and sumptuous as a decadent creme brûlée...the puzzlement and consternation as the band drifted into “This Isn’t The Place”, one of the most fragile and gorgeous tracks to come from Nine Inch Nails in recent years, the shocked delight as the first pulsing guitars from “The Perfect Drug”** came skittering off the stage, the stunned silence that fell over the crowd as “Over and Out” began.
Yes, yes, they still played “Wish”. “March of the Pigs”, “The Hand That Feeds”, “Head Like A Hole”, and “Hurt”, but aside from those tracks, the night was replete with surprises for true fans of Nine Inch Nails. Reznor tossed a few scraps to the casual fan then turned his back on them for the rest of the evening, embracing his chosen, those that have been with him from the beginning, those that do not need to hear “Closer” again, those that have always supported his music and will continue to do so, especially after this outpouring of gratitude and love for his fans.
Sadly, a good portion of the energy was offset by the lackluster sound balance. Perhaps the World Famous Radio City Music Hall wasn’t meant for such punishing noise, but whatever the case was, fifteen seconds into the opener (“Mr. Self Destruct”) it was evident that the bass was in the wrong place and that the volume was pegged at a six when they should have been ten times that. Despite the less-than-perfect acoustics, Nine Inch Nails delivered a singular experience, one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.
Photo/video gallery

* Whatever that means.
** THEY FUCKING PLAYED THE PERFECT FUCKING DRUG!!!!!!!