Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nailslive: Beside You in Time
(Interscope)
Thematically, 41-year-old Trent Reznor hasn’t matured much since he unleashed his self-destructive angst in the late ’80s. He’s still producing pitch-black high-school musicals for disaffected youths. Luckily, he hasn’t lost any of his bestial intensity, as this live DVD, taped last year, attests. The film captures NIN’s choreographed chaos — and Trent Reznor’s new, Rollins-like physique — with vérité rawness. Everything from Reznor’s buzz cut to the projected images of war and poverty inflate the band’s fuming drama, peaking with a corrosive “Terrible Lie” and the slow-motion elegy “Right Where It Belongs.” During a starkly backlit “Hurt,” the line “I am still right here” is followed by rapturous applause — 18 years on, Reznor’s tortured id still commands devotion.
