As soon as Alex spoke about doing this project, I knew this was the one I wanted to cover. For starters, And All That Could Have Been was the first DVD I remember buying.
 
You might fairly assume from that fact that this is therefore a show and a film I am intimately familiar with, and that assumption would be reasonable, but incorrect. See, when I bought the DVD, I didn’t yet own a player. So I will only have been able to watch it as a guest at the houses of others; most obviously, my fathers, and Nine Inch Nails are just not his cup of tea. Plus, let’s be honest; as a young man, sitting down to watch a Nine Inch Nails DVD with the old man would feel a bit… well, pointless, I guess.
 
So I haven’t absorbed it in the same way as my VHS purchases of that era (Skid Row ‘Roadkill’, anyone?). But that strange combination of fandom and distance (the financial commitment of buying a new DVD back then being substantial) pretty well summed up my relationship with NiN at that point.
 
For example, I saw Nine Inch Nails live in their first ever UK appearance - opening for Guns N Roses at Wembley Stadium in 1991. And yes, of course, I was there for GnR, and to a lesser-but-still-significant degree Skid Row. Still, I have a vivid memory of walking into the stadium as they played, the enormous screens showing this dark haired man in shades and black, arms crossed over the top of the mic stand as he sang. It was my first big-rock-show band, and without knowing anything about him, Reznor struck me as impossibly cool, and instantly iconic.
 
I then proceeded to give him and his band no more thought for three years.
 
Then, in 1994, my father returned from a holiday to the US with a copy of what he claimed was the number 1 album in the US that week (though wiki tells me it peaked at number 2). And so it was that I was almost certainly the first kid in North Devon to own a copy of The Downward Spiral on cassette. As far as I can recall, neither of us connected the album with the band we’d seen in ‘91.
 
And I’d love to tell you that it instantly clicked with me; that I recognised it’s genius, that it opened me up to whole new vistas of musical possibilities. But I didn’t. I thought it was… okay. The truth is I just found it too complex; to alienating. Too cold. I loved metal, and some of the noise aspects appealed to me, but I was all about the raw fury of GnR, the punk spirit of Skid Row, and the grandiosity of W.A.S.P. (don’t judge). Whilst Closer, Heresy, and March Of The Pigs had elements that appealed to me, I found the whole thing a bit harsh and inaccessible… not to mention electronic, which for a kid tribally opposed to dance music was profoundly alienating.
 
What can I say? I was an idiot.
 
Later, thanks to an increased acquaintance with the work of Reznor protege Marilyn Manson, and my own maturing taste, I revisited that cassette, and finally began to connect with it properly, appreciating the elements I’d previously found difficult as being part of what made it such an achievement. Still, for all that I grew to enjoy The Downward Spiral, it remained an album I admired more than I actually loved.
 
And then came The Fragile. And there, I did fall in love.
 
I played it obsessively, a point of considerable irritation for my then-flatmates, who were not similarly enamoured. And I’m not going to engage anyone who prefers The Downward Spiral in a pointless debate about something that's ultimately a matter of taste, but for me, The Fragile remains Reznor’s masterpiece - a stunning double album study of alienation, despair, and oh-so-delicate love and hope. I devoured it. And when I heard NiN would be headlining day 2 of the Lost Weekend at Docklands Arena - then just a handful of stops on the DLR from where I lived - you'd better believe I made damn sure I got tickets.
 
And then, of course, they didn’t play.
 
It wasn’t anyone’s fault - the drummer got intestinal flu, and NiN drummer is not a gig anyone can step into at no notice.  Still, it was a pretty big disappointment, and I really felt like I’d missed a moment. While I did later get to see NiN again, at Brixton Academy as part of the pre-Year Zero tour (and jolly good it was, too) I still felt like I’d missed out on something special - the live iteration of a band and a performer at the very peak of their imperial phase.
 
Which is almost certainly what motivated me, despite the high cost and lack of a machine to actually play it on, to purchase And All That Could Have Been.
 
The DVD itself is fine. The sound production and 5.1 mix is to the insanely high standards you’d expect from a Reznor release, and the film is a pretty faithful, if utterly standard live show capture. An artifact of it’s manufacture in the early days of the DVD format is that the show is split over two disks, which I’ll admit to finding charming. The band are dynamic, the light show superb, and Reznor is as magnetic as I remember, if not more so; dynamic, but not afraid to be still; and the vocal performance is superb, raw but never cracked, pushed, but holding strong.  Still and all, it’s a concert DVD. If you like that kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing you’ll like - but I think most of what made it remarkable when it came out was how unusual it was, especially the sound mix. Revisiting it for this article, there’s nothing to recommend it over, say, Slipknot’s Disasterpieces or Springsteen's Live In Barcelona, save personal preference. It’s a great record of a band at the top of their game, in other words.
 
The songs, on the other hand…. Holy shit, the songs.
 
Terrible Lie leads off magnificently, that two chord opening a one two punch that’s elemental. It’s classic Reznor songwriting in both theme and content; angry lyrics of betrayal and wounded trust, coupled to a verse/chorus that deploys crunching guitars and sparse electronica to great effect. What elevates it, in common with many of Reznor’s singles, is how the song develops; through a middle 8 that turns from condemnation to pleading (‘please don’t take away from me/I need someone to hold on to’) before closing out with an extended new vocal line over the verse riff, turning the structure inside out, before leading into the anthemic coupling denouement of ‘I wanted so much to believe/you fucking promised me’, delivered with fury and passion.
 
Sin is next, with an extended intro before the heavy synth verse takes us to the shout-along chorus, and then Match Of The Pigs and Piggy serve up a slice of Downward Spiral angst. March…  is magnificent, a piledriver riff, pounding drums, and a searing vocal combined to great effect. The live setting adds even more energy to the song, as the band allows the chorus piano breaks to play out just a little longer than on the recording, milking the crowd anticipation before the verses crash back in. Similarly, with Piggy, Reznor leaves the stage during the final coda, walking in front of the barrier so the audience can sing ‘nothing can stop me now’. The crowd feels like a part of the performance even on the CD, but in the DVD, occasional glimpses of the impassioned audience show just how deeply this band is connecting.
 
Next, The Frail and The Wretched give us a double bill of The Fragile songs. The instrumental tracks are some of my favorite moments on The Fragile, and here, the delicate piano of The Frail serves a slow build, introducing the other instruments gradually, layering the sound, before the drums lead straight into The Wretched, strong contender for my favourite NiN song. It’s quintessential Reznor, fury and spite warring with sadness and pity, with the build to the chorus feeling like it’s coming up from a well of disappointed rage, (‘It didn’t turn out the way you wanted it, did it?’), and then the crushing ‘Now/you know/this is what it feels like’. The performance here is exceptional, too, the band pulling out all the stops to deliver a sound that has fidelity to the original recording, while still containing live flourishes that elevate the song. It’s fantastic, and when Reznor leans over the edge of the stage at the end, leaning into the front row and sings ‘You try to stop it/but it keeps on coming’... Yeah, I get pissed all over again about the Lost Weekend fiasco.
 
The double bass drum of Gave Up pounds in next, lifting the energy levels up. It’s an absolute belter of a number, leading to another classic Reznor denouement (‘I tried/ I gave up’) followed by a relentless, thrashing close. Magnificent, and the way Reznor flings his guitar into the air at the end, you can tell he knows it.
 
La Mer takes us back to Fragile territory, with another extended instrumental, and again the band commitment to reproducing the studio sound in a live setting impresses (as does the production), and The Great Below continues in the same vein, simmering and atmospheric, Reznor delivering an amazing vocal performance, moving through to highs that he commits to with breathtaking rawness. With the amount of deserved praise his songwriting and production  skills receive, it's sometimes easy to forget just what a superb singer Reznor is, and this performance is an exemplar of  that talent. The Mark Has Been Made closes out the Fragile trilogy of tracks with another instrumental; this one harsher, bringing the guitars back in, a spiraling riff that leads into a heavy-as-hell section that, guitar sound and production aside, wouldn't be out of place in a stoner metal set - at least until the wordless vocal kicks in.
 
The quick drop from there to Wish is a savvy choice, brining the energy back up to the roof with yet another pulverising riff alternating with a blistering vocal into a killer chorus. I think of Nine Inch Nails as primarily an album band, but listening to this has forcibly reminded me just what a talented writer of singles Reznor is; Like Terrible Lie, Sin, and Head Like A Hole, this is a brilliantly constructed, anthemic three minute thirty slice of genius. Dropping from here into Complication, another instrumental, shouldn't really work, but it’s such a fast paced, groovy riff that it lands fine, the energy of the performance carrying the crowd and band alike, before they drop into Suck. There’s similar funk bass stylings here that we’ll get on Closer, but the atmosphere is very different, especially when the chorus crashes in. Again I’m stuck by how well the instrumentation works in the verses, little guitar licks accentuating the space in the centre of the song before the wall of noise chorus, and the drop down middle eight that builds back up.
 
Closer is a song that deserves it’s own essay, frankly. Here, I’ll simply note it’s a brilliant rendition that captures all the menace, loathing and longing of the original recording. Similarly, Head Like A Hole bounces along with a gleeful, defiant rage that is as explosive as the recorded article, if not moreso. Coming back for the encore, Just Like You Imagined builds the final instrumental of the evening, before Starfuckers Inc. delivers an explosion of energy, especially in the drop down, where Reznor changes the lyric, adding a ‘fuck you’ that is sung out solo and pretty much brings the house down, before with a quick stick count the band crashes back in for a final pounding chorus.
 
The set ends with Hurt, as must surely have been mandated. Again, a song with an essays worth of signification, which I have to assume if you’ve come this far, you know all about. It’s fucking magnificent.
 
Like a lot of live albums, And All That Could Have Been serves as dual purpose in a lot of ways; it works both as a document of a specific tour, and a de-facto greatest hits album. As the tour in question is arguably the moment at which Nine Inch Nails peaked, it packs an especially powerful punch; a setlist that’s all killer, no filler, coupled with a swaggering confidence and a playing-out-of-their-skin ferocity that creates a superb listening experience. Sure, a purinst might wish for Big Man With A Gun or Heresy to round out the collection, but that would miss the other thing that makes this such a great live set, which is the ebb and flow of the songs themselves, with a running order that takes the listener on a journey through kinetic fast paced battering, but also slower, more melancholic moments.
 
I still think either The Downward Spiral or The Fragile represent the very, very best NiN have to offer, but as a document of a time and a tour when they were essentially unbeatable, this is exactly what you want a live album to be.
 
And yes, yes, I do still wish I’d been there.
 
KIT POWER
18/5/19

There's little in all of human creative endeavour more viscerally emotive than music. It has been variously described in psychological and mythological terms as the highest form of art (so because, unlike almost every other form of creative expression, it does not require context or wider interpretation in order to evoke emotion or spark reaction), as the secret language of creation itself (various traditional and fantasy mythologies describe creation itself being sung into being, the secret rhythms of reality taking the form of a music beyond human comprehension, that our own pluckings and warblings are but pale echoes of).
 
The very best examples tap into that factor, acknowledge and reflect it, providing an experience that is ineffable and emotive, that evokes wider context without imposing or enshrining it.
 
Nine Inch Nails, with their grimy, industrial, suburban ethos, the impressions their music evokes of skittering on the edge of fractured and bleeding reality, are a prime example: their work generally schizophrenic and discordant, the sounds of breaking down machinery and shattering windows, the screams of damned human beings being mercilessly fed into ancient, metaphysical engines, their very, very finest work not only reflects certain cultural phenomena (they are very much of the school that taps into lost and disenfranchised youth, the celebration of apocalypse and the tearing down of established orders, systems and institutions) but also serves as a means of inspiring worlds:
 
Closing one's eyes and listening to, for example, the likes of The Fragile can be an experience as transcendental and hallucinatory as flying on certain narcotics (another factor that NIN's music deliberately taps into). They are, unlike most of the popular and mainstream music they clearly despise, not a communal experience; their work intended for the lost and isoalted, to be listened to in darkened bedrooms and basements, away from light, away from the eyes of every day humanity. It is a celebration of the monstrous, the outside, the outre. In that, it conjures nightmares and hellscapes: vast, industrial ruins and science fiction plains of alien, living flesh married to H.R. Giger bio-mechanisms, dystopias in which humanity is married to its engines in a manner that dissolves any definition between the two, and leaves all of creation little more than a seeping, grinding, impossibly elaborate mechanism, a grim, impotent god-machine that can never be free of itself or know its original intention.
 
Their work evokes story and mythology and particular states of lucid psychology that allows the listener to delve deep down, to pare away the septums that separate us from our sublimated layers of consciousness and dream whilst partially awake.
 
In that, the year 2000 remix album, Things Falling Apart, becomes almost ironic by nature of its very existence:
 
Originally released to critical desolation, the album boasts little in the way of new work, but takes existing tracks and subjects them to a Frankensteinian process of tearing apart and restructuring: some are hardly changed at all from their original incarnations, merely flourished with an extra layer of bass or back-beat, their tempo increased or slowed to a graveyard crawl, whereas others are  shredded to tatters before being pieced back together in forms that are barely recognisable.
 
Given the counter-culture, anti-establishment roots of the band itself, one might argue that the very existence of a “remix album” is a cynical example of hypocrisy, an entirely commercialised endeavour that was likely decided more by boardroom than by band meeting.
 
And that isn't entirely unfair when one sits down to listen to the album, but nor is it the entire story:
 
If one is unfamiliar with NIN and the particular musical sub-cultures in which they operate, then one might be forgiven for being captivated by the grinding, industrial nihilism of tracks like The Wretched, bleakly entranced by the child-like isolation and loneliness of Where is Everybody? Given that the album largely consists of tracks that are already familiar, that already have their places and contexts within the band's back-catalogue, it's hardly surprising that they remain as evocative and visceral as they ever were (even in their altered forms).
 
I can still listen to the likes of The Great Collapse and envision great, polluted waves rising over grimy, industrial towers and murky suburbs, chemical seas sweeping in to wash away the filth of humanity for new and awful forms of life to arise. I can still hear the engines that churn behind waking reality, that give rise to both genesis and apocalypse, that have been breaking down for aeons, whose entropy NIN's work reflects. I can hear the Lovercraftian horrors whispering and singing through the veil of reality worn hideously thin, pouring their mad dreams, their lunatic visions, into the minds of humanity.
 
I can listen to The Frail and feel a mind breaking down, a once brilliant genius dissolving into a mire of dementia and confusion. I can see the old man in his chair, perhaps twitching as malfunctioning augmetics and engines attempt to keep him alive while the world outside rots and grows ever more infested. I can see the wheels turning, the half-flesh, half-machine contraptions turning, swelling, billowing, the old man begging, begging to be put out of his misery, allowed to die with what little dignity, what little humanity, he has left.
 
I can listen to the Charlie Clouser remix of Starfuckers and feel the cold expanse of oblivion stretching endlessly all around, the light of dead stars on my naked body as something swirls in the dark, something vaster than stars or worlds or nebulae hurtling towards me, growing more maddening and elaborate with every beat of its multiple wings.
 
By contrast, the Dave Ogilvie remix of the same track is the screaming, discordant hymn of a prisoner, a sentience stripped of its original form and identity, sealed within a great engine that it is forced to feed and direct in its functions, a human brain surgically plucked from its skull and wired into an immense computer system as little more than a redundant processing unit, barely able to hold onto its sense of self amidst the millions of others it has become one with.
 
Adrian Sherwood's adaptation is more operatic: a space-opera apocalypse in which an industrialised Earth blooms and billows, great vessels and munitions rising from its surface to fill the sky with fire, to turn surrounding space into a psychedelic inferno, alien ships and those of humanity clashing in lunatic nihilism, not caring if they render the planet below uninhabitable, if they turn space itself into a wasteland.
 
That is where NIN have alway been at their strongest, the manner in which I have always engaged with their music: in its potential for imagery, for evoking mythology, which this album exhibits in characteristic style.
 
However, there is also a hollowness here, a lingering, tinny note of insincerity born by the album's nature as a fairly commercial, corporate exercise. Unlike so much of NIN's work, the album doesn't exist to shudder or unsettle its audience, to approach them almost violently in how starkly different it is from proscribed markets and mainstream works.
 
As such, much of its evocative qualities are dulled, certainly in comparison with previous albums and the work they produced in the earlier years of their career. It doesn't feel as powerful or emotive or traumatic as much of what's gone before. Instead, there is a staidness to it all, a synthetic quality that is difficult to cleanse from the palate, especially given that this was released as a companion to the eminently more sincere and experimental The Fragile.
 
The tracks, whilst maintaining a certain capacity to evoke and inspire, especially in certain altered frames of mind -which the music itself largely reflects-, also have a tendency towards similarity that  reduces the experience to an aural soup or mire. There is a thematic indistinction here that is notably absent in many other NIN albums, which can have the quality of making one track bleed into another or become little more than a minor deviation from its siblings. This can make the album feel overdrawn and even slightly wearisome at times, a far cry from the heady emotion of The Fragile or the prog-rock visionary qualities of The Downward Spiral.
 
That said, there is still no denying how powerfully vivid and evocative the album is at its best, the opening track, Slipping Away, establishing a heavily mechanical, dystopian theme from the off, sounding like the interminable pounding of great engines that the later tracks mythologically elaborate upon, the following piece -Where is Everybody?- eliciting an almost cyber-punk element of existential crisis that present-day audiences might associate with the likes of The Gorillaz, most notably Demon Days, which has more than a minor NIN influence.  
 
As the backing track for imaginative or meditational exercise, as a phenomena to lose oneself in, there is little like Nine Inch Nails. Even in their less well-regarded moments, there are barbs and embers of emotion, of visceral reaction; images that coalesce unbidden in the audience's mind, leaving them to wonder what unspoken realms the music might lead them to, if they allow it; what forbidden or sacred spaces within themselves they might unlock, should they prove perverse enough.
 
In that, Things Falling Apart occupies a strange place, best experienced outside of context, as a phenomena unto itself, in the isolation of one's own thoughts, where the music can carry us to wherever and whatever states it wills. 

George Daniel Lea