It takes Trent Reznor 45 minutes to say hello. He voices his surprise that it's taken his band Nine Inch Nails nearly 30 years to do a show in Thailand. They almost made it in 2014 for the aborted Silverlake Festival in Pattaya, cancelled due to the volatile political climate, so there was no small amount of anticipation ahead of their show at Bangkok's packed Moonstar Studio on Tuesday night.
NIN broke big with their debut release, 1989's Pretty Hate Machine. Band leader Reznor weaponised synth-pop, goth and industrial sounds, creating a muscular version of weedy teen angst -- compare the fey gothic shtick of The Cure's Robert Smith, with the back-combed hair and smudged eyeliner of an auntie returning from a boozy wake, and Reznor's mic-gripping, guns-flexing fury. Reznor fused the leftfield electronica of bands like Skinny Puppy and Front 242 with big choruses and sex/religion/death music videos. But that was 20-odd years ago -- surely it would sound ridiculous now, delivered by a man in his fifties?
The band were ferocious. They hit the stage and delivered a one-two punch from 1999's Fragile -- Somewhat Damaged and The Day The World Went Away -- setting a template for 90 minutes of sonic assault. The band were tight and thunderous after honing the set on dates in Europe this summer. The intensity sustained until the seventh song, The Frail, a reverb-drenched piano instrumental which allowed us, and Reznor, to catch our breath. For this current tour Reznor has curated a 21-song romp through nearly 30 years of music, with half the set taken from the band's first three albums. The new and old songs sit well together, sharing the same musical DNA and if-it-ain't-broke NIN themes of despair, pain and aggression. The tour even carries the very NIN name of Cold And Black And Infinite.
Reznor's idea for this tour was to play smaller, more intimate venues, and Moonstar Studio is an apt space -- a featureless black cube where black-clad fans rock out to the black-clad band. The staging was minimal -- no visuals, no screens -- but the lighting was excellent, washing the smoke-filled stage with colour and flicking between stroboscopic attack, nuclear flash and plunges into darkness.
Halfway through the set came a run of three songs from the new, well-received album Bad Witch. Reznor is now 53 and no longer an angry young man -- he's a financially-secure father of four and has been rehab-clean for over a decade -- so how does he ensure the NIN formula doesn't become derivative? Switching from the personal to the political has provided plenty of targets for his ire as he bemoans what he describes as "the fall of America in real time". His vocals may be less of a caps-lock tirade, but the lead track on the new album, God Break Down The Door, loops the refrain, "Remove the pain and push it back in", which could have been written by Reznor in 1989, 1994 or on Tuesday afternoon by a program that auto-generates NIN lyrics.
The skittish techno of the new songs was well received by the Bangkok crowd but it's the old hits that got the mosh pit jumping. Head Like A Hole and March Of The Pigs were huge and menacing, with guitarist Robin Finck and keyboard player Atticus Ross locked in a thrilling duel for sonic dominance. Both songs sounded surprisingly contemporary considering that they're from 1989 and 1994. The kinetic funk of Closer followed, and David Bowie's I'm Afraid Of Americans got a glam stomp reworking, albeit a reworking of NIN's own remix of the original song.
They closed with what Reznor now calls a Johnny Cash song. NIN's trademark sturm und drang can distract from Reznor's songwriting chops, most apparently in how well his song Hurt leant itself to Johnny Cash's emotional treatment. Hurt was performed in Bangkok as a cover of Cash's cover, delicate and acoustic, with its tension derived from our expectation that the band was about to explode into noise. They didn't, until a final giant power chord that sustained long after the band had left the stage.
