Last summer Robert Smith curated the Meltdown festival in the UK with handpicked acts ranging from My Bloody Valentine to Nine In Nails to The Church. The Cure, of course, headlined but were billed as CURÆTION-25 so as not to violate a contract for its massive headlining slot a few weeks later in London’s Hyde […]

[Read more →]

I have to admit I think the new Nine Inch Nails song is great. Trent Reznor injects this comeback single with everything that was ever good about his band: Bracing synths, machine beats, aggro guitars, and Reznor’s idiosyncratic whisper/wail combination. All of it works exactly as it should in “Came Back Haunted.” It’s already one […]

[Read more →]

To help Nine Inch Nails “wave goodbye” to its New York City audience at Terminal 5 two nights ago, Peter Murphy dropped slowly from the netherworld upside down on a chain. Like a bat, get it? Anyone who saw Bauhaus at Coachella knows this trick well. And thanks to that fancy series of tubes we […]

[Read more →]

HAHAHAHAHA. Wow. I cannot imagine how this came to be. Nine Inch Nails performed “Down in It” on that cheeseball show Dance Party USA circa Pretty Hate Machine, so about 20 years ago. Mr. Reznor sounds less than pleased in the snippet that precedes the dancing fun. But, I mean, who forced him to go […]

[Read more →]

Despite some individual members’ supreme awfulness over the years as well as the automatic lameness of the whole cash-cow reunion charade, I’m kind of intrigued to see the original line-up of Jane’s Addiction play again. Lone hold-out Eric Avery had long said he had no interest in pursuing the past, but I guess he caved […]

[Read more →]

For a band whose ability to survive catastrophe defies any semblance of logic, a full-fledged reunion hardly seems out of the question or even surprising for Motley Crue. What might be a little surprising, however, is that the band’s 2005 Carnival of Sins tour made money hand over fist, filling arenas all over the country […]

[Read more →]