NINE INCH
NAILS
Bristol Bierkeller
DEAR MR Trent Reznor. There are pop music
baddies and pop music goodies (make up your own list, scribble ‘em on your
pencil case) and I really wanted NIN to be on
my side. I sort of liked the records, their dumb negativity, their squeaky
bleakness and flashes of metal. I‘ll be best friends with any band that get so
regularly lumped with The Revolting Cocks and their disgusting ilk. I came
prepared to be awed.
Your band emerged from behind a barrage of
eardrum-rupturing noise and grey fumes and... Oh my God! It‘s Adam And The
Ants! Not the good Adam And The Ants with the funny Jolly highwayman costumes
and feathers in their hair, but the posy, posturing utterly totally, definitively
KER-RAP! pre- ‘sell-out’ art-school version. I mean, you even do the Ants‘ song
‘Physical‘ and manage to make it sound crapper and even more ridiculous than
the original.
OK, so looks aren‘t everything, but they‘re at
least 50 per cent of a live show and, I‘m sorry, but the sight of a pretentious
little boy with a silly haircut crouched behind a microphone making strange“
gestures with his hands like some awesome rock messiah always makes me want to laugh,
at first. After about half an hour I felt bored and nauseated. Yes, I know the
kids think you‘re some sort of really cool gut-level intellectual cum poet, but
they thought the same thing about Kirk Brandon. Doesn‘t that worry you?
Mr Trent Reznor, I‘m sure you‘re a wonderful
guy, I bet you love small children and dogs and are a warm and sensitive lover.
But onstage you are about as much fun as Christmas in a genital cancer ward. An
evening watching your band is about as pleasurable as three-way sex with Mr and
Mrs Himmler.
And yes they sounded awful too. Almost every
song plodded along, got good right at the end with some fancy metal guitar and
then got crap again. I mean, I‘ve seen some tedious gigs in my time, I‘ve sat through
some hideous hours of unlistenable, tuneless, dull shite - Spear Of Destiny, Theatre Of Hate, Ned‘s
Atomic Dustbin, New Order, Fields Of The Nephilim, Man O‘War, Big Country
(AAAAGH! My head hurts just thinking about them) - but you really take the
industrial disco biscuit.
If you choose to make a T-shirt out of the
review you will be invoiced accordingly.
Yours sincerely,
Steven Wells
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