Trent Reznor wanted the audience to know he hadn’t spent the band’s three-year hiatus on the beach.<\/b>
\nFYF Fest ended with a new beginning.
Headlining the main stage Sunday night, Nine Inch Nails played its first \u201creal show, \u201d as frontman Trent Reznor put it, in nearly three years to close out the annual music festival in Exposition Park.
But as he brought his influential industrial-rock outfit back to life (following a warm-up gig last week in Bakersfield) , Reznor wanted the crowd at FYF to know he hadn\u2019 t been sitting on a beach since 2014. He and his bandmates had been in the studio, he said \u2014 \u201chiding out, watching the world go crazy.\u201d
You could hear the effects in their furious 90-minute set, which mixed vivid renditions of old hits like \u201cMarch of the Pigs\u201d and \u201cHead Like a Hole\u201d with exasperated tunes from a pair of EPs the group released ahead of its return to the road.
In the new \u201cLess Than, \u201d Reznor railed against a clumsy yet arrogant authority figure \u2014 \u201cOffend and pretend and defend and demand my compliance, \u201d he sang over a menacing disco-punk beat \u2014 while \u201cThe Hand That Feeds, \u201d from 2005, revived a Bush-era critique of blood spilled \u201cin the name of the holy and the divine.\u201d
He seemed certain the protest still applied. (Other acts on Sunday\u2019s bill touched on politics as well, including the bumptious rap duo Run the Jewels and Solange, who sang gorgeously about institutional racism.)
Some of what Reznor observed during the band\u2019s hiatus hit closer to home, particularly the death of his friend and collaborator David Bowie. On Sunday, Reznor said he\u2019 d asked Bowie\u2019s camp if he could rework a song from the late singer\u2019s final album, 2016\u2019s \u201cBlackstar\u201d; he thought the exercise might help him put Bowie\u2019s death \u201cin context, \u201d he explained.
The result was a haunted cover of \u201cI Can\u2019 t Give Everything Away, \u201d which Reznor sang (along with what sounded like Bowie\u2019s recorded vocals) amid a weave of intricate synth patterns.
Nine Inch Nails \u2014 now a five-man operation with the addition of Reznor\u2019s film-music partner, Atticus Ross \u2014 managed more moments of tenderness. There was \u201cSomething I Can Never Have, \u201d a stately piano ballad from the band\u2019s 1989 debut, \u201cPretty Hate Machine.\u201d
And there was the late-\u2019 90s \u201cThe Frail, \u201d which in retrospect clearly heralded Reznor and Ross\u2019s award-winning scores for \u201cThe Social Network\u201d and \u201cThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.\u201d
Delicate and slow-moving, both were far from the norm for an outdoor festival set, a clear indication of Reznor\u2019s confidence in the devotion of his audience \u2014 and also in his players\u2019 impressive control.
Indeed, Nine Inch Nails may actually have sounded too good on Sunday; more than once, I found myself wanting the band to cut loose from Reznor\u2019s exacting arrangements, to balance all the tension with a bit of release.
Or at least I did until the group got to \u201cCloser.\u201d Still the band\u2019s biggest song more than two decades after it came out, this slithering goth-funk jam \u2014 a masterpiece of texture and groove \u2014 sounded as sexy and as audacious as it ever has at FYF.
Maybe more audacious, in fact. For all the talk about how coarse pop culture has grown in recent years, it\u2019s virtually impossible to imagine \u201cCloser, \u201d with its unprintable lyric about animal desire, making it onto the radio today as the song did in 1994.
Even in a world gone crazy, a prudish instinct abides \u2014 yet another outrage to fuel Reznor\u2019s disgust.
mikael.wood@latimes.com
Twitter: @mikaelwood<\/p>\n

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