Skip to main content
Boys Noize turned Moda Center into Portland’s hottest goth club on Friday, Aug. 8. With the city’s largest venue awash in red light, the Berlin DJ (whose work we discussed in our LSDXOXO review) chose slow and steady beats, rich industrial textures and suggestive vocal samples most obviously described by the man behind me: “I don’t know whether I want to dance or fuck!”
It’s unclear how much of what he played resembles the Tron: Ares soundtrack, but Boys Noize’s set built anticipation for the concert and the forthcoming movie all the same.
My boyfriend couldn’t resist gloating to me that morning about seeing Nine Inch Nails at La Luna, one of the city’s pivotal nightclubs in the ’90s, with the same glee that NIN’s audience this evening will possess in years to come. Trent Rezner, age 60, remains in top form as a physically engaged singer/multi-instrumentalist. Rezner led a tight four-act show that saw him, Atticus Ross, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini schlep back and forth between a veil-covered main stage and a smaller but more central stage set halfway between the stage where drummer Josh Freese stayed and the DJ booth on the other end of the floor. The group, joined seamlessly by Boys Noize during the third act, delivered more than a greatest hits-and-deep cuts show enhanced by artfully projected visuals of a smoldering ring and Rezner’s silhouette reinterpreted in real time as a ghostly crowd, a troupe of shadow dancers and a crystal-kaleidoscope of angles of that perfect snarl.
Some guests in the packed house couldn’t resist hollering at Rezner during the relatively quiet first act that saw Finck and Cortini join him onstage. He never addressed this, showman that he is, but NIN’s use of particularly blinding stage lights during some of their most popular songs in the final act felt like Rezner’s justified revenge. The first two acts pulled heavily from The Downward Spiral and the 1992 EP Broken, while the latter acts mostly focused on newer songs like “She’s Gone Away” from Twin Peaks’ third season, the Tron single “As Alive as You Need Me to Be” and a sampling of 2010s singles. The final act included Rezner’s odes to the late and great Davids—Bowie, whose unfortunately timeless song “I’m Afraid of Americans” he covered, and Lynch, whom he thanked before playing the Lost Highway song “The Perfect Drug”—and closed with “Hurt.” Ending a concert with that one felt odd: It more closely matched the mood of the opening act, but dampened none of the audience’s enthusiasm.
