Nine Inch Nails, Nov. 2, Wash. D.C.

Wow, ok, so yesterday was the Queens of the Stone Age and Nine Inch Nails concert at the MCI Center in beautiful downtown Washington D.C. I have never seen either band before and I was quite happy for the chance to finally see them live. While I am not a fan of shows at arenas or stadiums because the intimacy is lost and the bands pretty much have to stick to a standard set of songs due to time restrictions being in place, the two bands did quite well for what they had to work with.

The opening act was Death From Above 1979, which I had heard of before but never heard before, and I was quite impressed by them. The arena was barely 1/3 of the way full but the 2 man band did not care as they blistered through a crushingly loud set of fast paced punk/jam metal (the only way I can describe it). One bass, one drum set. That's all they needed and they pretty much rocked, I came away quite impressed.

Next came Queens of the Stone Age, who appeared a little miffed that even though the stadium was filling up, no one cared that they were on stage. Because of this, frontman Josh Homme even said towards the end of the set "I hope you guys have fun tonight and don't just sit there with your thumbs up your ass all night." I guess that was his form of saying the crowd sucked. In any case, I like QotSA a lot, but their music seems to make me sleepy. Its not for lack of loudness or heaviness or anything, its occasionally fast paced, always sludgy and thick, but Homme's voice for some reason puts me in a sleepy trance every time I hear it. Nevertheless, they put on a good show and played songs from mostly their last 2 albums, a little disappointing since I wanted to hear a couple tracks from "R".

Finally, Nine Inch Nails came on. They had a huge somewhat transparent cloth (used for projecting movies at one point) over the entire stage, behind it they filled the stage completely with smoke. Looked like a big bbq was going on there, but then they backlighted the cloth and the band kicked into a non stop set of songs that lasted a good hour and a half. (set list will be posted at the bottom). They crushed the heavy songs like Wish and March of the Pigs (Moshing didn't occur much in the crowd until the song Wish came on, a few pits opened and quickly closed thereafter) and settled down on the slow ones like Hurt (many many lighters and crowdmembers singing along). NIN basically did a very professional arena rock set of their greatest hits spanning Reznor's entire catalogue. The guitarist was crazy as heck, bouncing around on stage, destroying his and his bandmate's equipment, throwing bottles at the audience and attacking all of the other guys on stage. Hilarious.

Overall, a pretty standard arena rock show, no real surprises, but it was a solid concert to see. Nothing like finally getting to see one of your favorite bands of the last 15 years live in concert. So while it was nothing special, it was still pretty darn amazing. I know I was pretty amped up after.

Set List
1. Pinion
2. Love Is Not Enough
3. You Know What You Are
4. Terrible Lie
5. The Line Begins To Blur
6. March Of the Pigs
7. The Frail
8. The Wretched
9. Closer
10. Burn
11. Gave Up
12. Eraser
13. Right Where It Belongs
14. Beside You In Time
15. The Collector
16. Wish
17. Only
18. Reptile
19. Suck
20. Hurt
21. The Hand That Feeds
22. Head Like A Hole