POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Nine Inch Nails: Slick, Alienating

When directors of a certain type of hip noir movie want to demonstrate that their protagonists have penetrated the heart of the nightlife underground, a show by Cleveland’s popular industrial-disco band Nine Inch Nails might be the kind of thing they have in mind.

Nine Inch Nails’ slick, alienating spectacle is kind of flashy in spite of itself, and it leavens the usual gloomy thudding with hooks, choruses, melodies and other bourgeois stuff like that. Plus, there’s moody backlighting enough to make Adrian Lyne look like Preston Sturges.

At a packed Helter Skelter on Tuesday, the band’s auteur Trent Renzor howled into the void, ducked and whirled, and tossed beverage after beverage into the crowd as his three sidemen pounded accompaniment on (live) jungle drums and shrieking feedback guitar. The drummer played behind a framework of horizontal bars that stretched across the stage. There was a halo effect around Renzor created by pulsating planes of colored light that shined through the grid. Fog blew across the stage as if whipped by a high wind.

Nine Inch Nails is sort of the Run-DMC of industrial disco, the band that took a dance-rooted form and grafted it to heavy rock ‘n’ roll, making it palatable to squadrons of fans who might have disdained the music in its pure form. With “Head Like a Hole,” it scored a genuine KROQ hit. And Tuesday, though the band displayed a smidgen of the “Funkytown”-style technocentrism you’ve grown to expect from industrial dance music, Renzor managed to convey the power and majesty of such bands as Ministry and Skinny Puppy while also managing to rock.