Here are my thoughts:
OPENING BANDS:
Death From Above 1979
Well, I can see that the reactions to DFA1979 were pretty varied, I can completely understand that. Personally I'm a fan and I thought that they were a great choice for an opening band (thanks to Josh Homme for that, I suppose, apparently he's the one that suggested them to Trent). I suppose the problem is getting accross the sound of a bass player and a drummer who's singing . . . that's a pretty heavy, low sound there and it's easy for it to dissolve into noise, especially if you don't know the melodies in the first place. One of my friends was quite impressed with both the sound and the stage show, and it's sortof telling that she's a bit of a metalhead as far as her normal taste in concerts go, she's had experience hearing the music in the "noise". I was actually gladly surprised to hear the drummer/singer's voice come through pretty clearly for the most part. They played a fair number of songs I hadn't heard, and I'm unsure of whether they're from the yet-to-be-recorded record or from their EP, since I only own their main LP (and I mean that literally, since I own it in vinyl for some crazy reason!), Unfortunately that sortof messed up my memory for names of songs, so I'm unable to really remember the setlist (if anyone else could at least help jog my memory, that'd be much appreciated--if their were from that 6-song EP, I might just have to go out and get it!).
I was actually more into their set than I was for QotSA later, but I think alot of that is knowing songs and being familiar with their sound . . . it can be a bit off-putting at first, it's quite strange to make up your band with just bass guitar and drums and they have a rather unique way of doing that rather than just being a band missing the other intruments.
I was somewhat surprised that they didn't play Sexy Results, though. I heard once from a girl that saw DFA1979 awhile back that she didn't really hear anything but noise for most of their songs, but Sexy Results . . . well, she made much fuss of how enamoured she was with that song, let us put it that way.. In many ways I think it's the song that reaches out to non-fans (or fans in the making) the most, so the exclusion from the setlist struck me as a bit odd, though it
is a longer song than their usual fare.
On a final note, anyone that didn't like them live there, if you haven't heard their songs in the pre-recorded form, check those out at least. If you still don't like them, well, I suppose that's life. But you might find yourself getting into them (my own gateway track was "Go Home Get Down").
Random sitenote: the "memo" (read: journal) section on
the Death From Above 1979 site hasn't been updated in awhile, but one of the last entries is actually from the last time DFA1979 was in Edmonton, and he makes a few comments that aren't, uhh, exactly "hurrah Edmonton" but, honestly, are kindof funny and pretty spot-on from my own self-deprecating perspective (and I say that having been born here).
Queens of the Stone Age
Firstly, I didn't get into much of their set for some reason, but secondly, I really do like them and parts of it were just superb. Problem is that I'm not that well versed in their music, there were large tracts of it that I just didn't know but sounded very much the same to my ears, alas . . . so for awhile in the set I just wasn't captivated. it certainly picked up as Josh started talking to the audience more, and yeah, as The Coz mentioned the parts with the hecklers were hilarious ("Yeah, where's your band? Oh? You don't have one? Then shut the fuck up!" and later something along the lines of "What do you think you're going to do? Bad idea, taking on someone when he's got the whole fuckin' PA behind him", crowd cheers wildly), and when he started "Little Sister" up by saying "This one's for you, 'cause you're my Little Bitch", hah, excellent.
This was another case of 'damn, I hope someone posts a setlist', 'cause my memory is full of holes from the songs I didn't know. From my own (rather bad, and certainly unfair) perspective, it picked up with Burn The Witch, which is a song I've waffled on whether I like it that much or not but really came to life live (hmm, bad way to say that, but oh well), there were still songs after that which should have been as unfamiliar to me as the ones before but they seemed more unique and I was enthralled even without having ever heard them before. The performance (and very chopped up and different from the album version, which was cool) of No One Knows was very impressive, but dammit, the old album version sounds restrained and low-energy to my ears now! A pretty good performance in the end, then, I'm regretful I hadn't gotten into them more beforehand but, as noted, they managed to snag me about halfway or so into it, so it worked out in the end.
And yeah, I had somehow never managed to hear "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret" before the show. I'm going to have to parrot The Coz again anyways, though:
nice.
NINE INCH FUCKING NAILS:
So here's where it's at! I'm not sure what I could say here, other than a string of superlatives. Awesome to hear Right Where It Belongs live, interesting to see that temp-screen and the projector going onto it for Eraser and RWiB and then the faux-breaking of it with the mic stand by Trent to kick in the high part of Beside You In Time, all very cool.
Yeah, definitely at least seemed more than 5 minutes, but it wasn't that bad of a time, just hanging out, catching the opportunity to sit down for a bit (my section was certainly not a sitting place! We were halfway up the bottom section directly to stage right, ie. the side that Jeordie was on, so pretty close to the stage (
very close when contemplating the size of that arena) while still having a good view of the entire stage at once. If I recall, Trents comment was more along the lines of "You're the crazy fuckers who broke it!" instead of "ones"
. When they were getting ready to play again he made some comments including "They just don't make them like they used to", referring to that insufficient barrier.
Trent introduced Even Deeper with something along the lines of "this one's from The Fragile", and that underscored a point, made even clearer with the introduction of "this song's by Joy Division" for Dead Souls immediately afterwards . . . this was a fairly radical setlist, when all is considered, even all the little details (like, as mentioned, Closer with The Only Time mixed in). Definitely cool to have
two non-album tracks (three cheers for Burn!), odd that some of the songs from With Teeth that showed up earlier in the tour were gone (awithateetha, anyone?) but still it lent itself heavily to the new album, I
really did not expect to hear Right Where It Belongs and Beside You In Time live (and odd for them to be in reversed order!). Bottom line is, Nine Inch Nails has never been a conservative band in music, it's nice to see that the shows this time around aren't all "let us play our most predictably popular old songs". I knew they were going for this somewhat revisionist approach 'cause I read too much on the internet, heh, but it's another thing to actually see and hear it for youself . . . the unpredictability, the hearing songs one didn't expect to hear, and every one of them holding its own. Opening a set with two songs from the newest album? unheard of! But NIN has been doing that since the start of the With Teeth tours, right? And those two songs are live songs through and through, I mean, as much as I enjoyed the first two bands, those two songs alone banished them from my thoughts, all was Nine Inch Nails.
Throughout all of it, Aaron North was, well, "fucking insane" would probably cover it, swinging his guitar around like he was using it in a swordfight against a samurai . . . I have to correct the statement that he destroyed his guitar at the end. He didn't just destroy his guitar, he destroyed that
entire side of the stage, his guitar being smashed liberally in the process of taking out all the equipment (the drum set certainly won't be the same for the next show, I'd assume). It certainly reminded me of that old bit from interviews where Trent talks about meeting Aaron North for that tryout, and he walks in with "shitty equipment", and, well, no wonder, he wouldn't want to freaking pay for it every show! Abuse and destroy seems to be his style, though I"m still sad I had no chance at getting the shattered wreck of the guitar that was thrown into the audience at the end.
Some random non-performance anecdotes from my friends and I:
Two of my friends came that I didn't expect, one of whom was supplying the ticket for the other (who hadn't even really heard
of Nine Inch Nails before, crazy russian) and I was taken aback to hear how much of a fan he was. I just had no clue. This ties then into something else: I bought Still, much to my own surprise. I hadn't really expected to find it anywhere, foolish me, I was always waffling over whether to buy it from nin.com or not 'cause it didn't seem to be offered anywhere else ever (damn prevalent 1-disk versions of And All That Could Have Been!), but I was in line for merch with some of my friends there and one of them pointed towards the stack of CDs, which I had assumed was With Teeth . . . but it was Still! I immediately plunked down the $15 for it (unfortunately, the damn things seems to be copyright protected since I haven't gotten it to play in my install of Kubuntu Linux yet, but I'll see later how something like Plextools or EAC fares, I think I just might have messed up my copy of linux, heh). But anyways, afterwards that friend of mine who was a closet fan noted that he already had it; he had, in fact,
all of them, he said. Surely you mean just the albums, right, not, say, Fixed? Nope, he had that too. Things Falling Apart? He had that. Well, at least you certainly don't have all the singles or something like that. No, he has
all the singles . . . wow. That's one of the cool things about these concerts, they bring the fans out of the woodwork!
Also, two of my friends who smoke almost got kicked out, since they tried a trick to get outside through a door propped open with a shoe so they could smoke. They actually kindof
did get kicked out, but were let back in again in time to come back during that eternity break between Queens of the Stone Age and Nine Inch Nails.
Also during that break, apparently those two were going around noting all the people smoking, shall we say non-nicotine products. My one friend bemoanded aloud the fact that she had nothing in the way of drugs herself, prompting a nearby guy to hand her a
HUGE bag saying "here, I'm fuckin' wasted already, won't do
me/i] any good." I emphasize how big it was, this was not the kind of amount you would reasonably take to a concert, this was the amount you would smuggle accross the border, insane. (if you're wondering why the guy was so generous to my friend, even taking into account being as baked as he must have been, it should be noted that my friend in question is a far more attractive girl than is good for someone of her under-age to be, something that complicates alot of things in life but pays pretty big dividends in cases like this).
In conclusion:
Words don't do it justice. The bottom line is, all my friends (myself counted among those) that were fans left the show much affirmed and joyful. My friends that weren't really fans have corrected that error of judgement. And oops, I still owe one of my friends the money for the ticket . . . erm. But an awesome show.
. 
). Hopefully there's a few more out there from other perspectives...
