Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor is an artist who listens to his demons, an approach that has led to some of the darkest--and most compelling--music of the rock era.
In a series of albums and concerts in the early and mid-'90s, Reznor explored issues of insecurity and self-loathing with a primal fury that made him not only one of rock's most popular figures, but also one of its most influential.
But Reznor ran into something of a creative dead-end last year when he released "The Fragile," a sprawling album that was brilliant in places but so relentlessly dark and overblown (at more than 100 minutes) that it proved inaccessible for even many of his most devoted fans.
Worse, the album, his first in five years, failed to expand upon Reznor's original message. The instrumental textures were imaginative and affecting, but the lyrics either retraced earlier ideas or simply misfired. When the collection was a disappointment in the marketplace, questions were raised about Reznor's ability to still connect with audiences on a mass level.
On Tuesday at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, Reznor answered the doubts with a nearly two-hour concert that was as confident and commanding as the Lakers' fourth-quarter charge Sunday against the Portland Trail Blazers.
Reznor knows the importance of demonstrating the continued vitality of his music, and he and the four musicians in this edition of Nine Inch Nails delivered that music with a relentless force that conveyed the genuine thrill of electrifying rock 'n' roll.
They were backed by lighting that crisscrossed the stage with jabs and stabs so in rhythm with the music that they seemed like another instrument. (Marc Brickman is the tour's lighting set designer, and Leroy Bennet is the lighting programmer.)
Reznor raced around the stage, sometimes tumbling across the floor or bumping into the musicians--as if he too was somehow an extension of the sledgehammer beats that were woven through a symphony of guitars, synthesizers and drums.
Equally effective was Reznor's choice of songs, drawn from various albums to provide an overview of his musical journey.
"Hey God, why are you doing this to me . . . ," Reznor shouted in the opening number. "Seems like salvation only comes in dreams."
The line from "Terrible Lie," a song on NIN's 1989 album, "Pretty Hate Machine," nicely summarizes Reznor's search for some kind of faith or comfort. The fact that he opened the show with it rather than a song from the new album offered a clue to what was ahead.
