For the shark to survive, it must keep moving. For the amoeba, it must keep evolving. For Trent Reznor, all he needs is young blood. All he needs is an exhaustable supply of adolescents raised of killing, suffering and pain, or at the very least, some nice healthy middle-class anger.

As he enters his forties though, you wouldn’t know that it is some 16 years since his ‘band’, Nine Inch Nails, made their recording debut. Aside from the quantum leap in production since his first home-made album and it’s megastudio followup, Nine Inch Nails have remained in stasis for more than a decade, producing an permanently frozen, broken record of an immature rage. There’s no development, just endless variations of a limited range of emotions that coalesce into 60 minutes of music every five years or so, 

With his ever changing band of furious, youthful cronies, Nine Inch Nails are nothing more than a museum piece : they never change, never evolve, and surely when Reznor is 65, he’ll still be touring in 2033 and sounding exactly the same. Like an industrial James Brown, he surrounds himself with angry young men on the payroll who whip up a phalanax of screaming and stuff whilst he sweats for The Olympics and yells sometimes. For a minute or more, he stands immobile at the back whilst his hired army perform the best Nine Inch Nails covers in the world, and he sweats a bit. Get Up! Get On The Scene! Like A Pretty Hate Machine!

The problem is Nine Inch Nails are no light and all shade. Garbed in identikit black with an all black drumkit, black guitars, black everything, Nine Inch Nails are incredibly angry, and they’re not really sure what about. I think it’s about a world that rejected him, someone who betrayed him, a god that is no longer here, a millionaires lament to an adolescent state of naiveity and innocence he is probably glad to have shed. Their brand of virgin industrumetal, good as it is, quickly becomes an undistingushable slew of one-dimensional, black-clad, screaming rage with a vampire ringleader feeding off the youth of his backing band.

And after two hours, it gets boring being prodded by noise. Like God himself reached down with his big hand just to push you down, just to keep you down. Motherfucker. But Nine Inch Nails are stuck. Despite the passion, the flair, the sheer power of their assualt, it soon merges into an identkit, homogenic mass of screaming and stuff. It gets boring. There’s no room for anything bar rage, fury, and a bit of anger.

Change or die, because you’re fast turning into an artifact, not an artist. Any colour you like, as long as it’s black.    

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