To open their encore set Saturday at the Fillmore Auditorium, Death Cab for Cutie sent singer Ben Gibbard out alone with an acoustic guitar. Standing stage left looking like he just played a pickup basketball game, Gibbard delivered a melancholy meditation on death and separation, “I’ll Follow You Into the Dark.” His voice danced up and down the scale, trumping any singalongs.
The show before a youngish crowd (“Is anyone here 21?” said the cocktail waitress) was a satisfying display of DCFC’s melodic indie pop, alternately affecting and overwrought.
The knock on the new album “Plans” – that it doesn’t explore much new territory – could be extended to the show. The band was tight and energetic, but it seemed from the start there was little chance for spontaneity.
That isn’t to say the expected doesn’t work. The band ended the show with the anthem-like title track from “Transatlanticism.” The song could be for Death Cab what “40” used to be for U2: a closing hymn.
When Gibbard ducked behind the piano and closed the evening with the plea, “I need you so much closer. … So come on, come on,” there was no shortage of people willing to follow him into the dark.
– Eric Gorski
Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Autolux
War protests are at their most subtle, and most powerful, when Trent Reznor is ticked off. And halfway through Nine Inch Nails’ set at the Pepsi Center on Oct. 5, a screen descended upon the stage’s apron as NIN set into the ever-building “Eraser.” Images of nature and life and beauty gave way to pictures of destruction and rot and death as the song reached its relentless climax – “Lose me/Hate me/Smash me/Erase me/Kill me” – as the song segued into the ballad “Right Where It Belongs,” which is Reznor’s heartbreaking follow-up to “Hurt.”
“What if everything around you isn’t quite as it seems?/What if all the world you think you know is an elaborate dream?/And if you look at your reflection, is it all you want to be?/What if you could look right through the cracks, would you find yourself afraid to see?”
The destruction on the screen matched the deconstruction in the music, and it was the highlight of a Nine Inch Nails show that weighed too heavily upon older material and tricks. “Gave Up,” “Wish” and “Sin” are all excellent tracks, and they’re even better live, but they’re also NIN show regulars and more than 10 years old. “Closer” could be retired forever, and nobody but the frat boys would complain. And while “Hurt” is still an epic, moving mind-flip, it deserves a hiatus. The show would have benefited more from the inclusion of more from this year’s “With Teeth” and 1999’s underrated masterwork “The Fragile.” Instead some of NIN’s flame was stolen from the show’s openers.
Josh Homme’s Queens of the Stone Age proved yet again his imposing prowess and impressive ability to write a killer, brutalizing riff (“In My Head,” “Burn the Witch”).
Autolux was My Bloody Valentine in detention. Eugene Goreshter was better slinging his bass toward the amp stacks than he was behind the mic, but drummer Carla Azar stole the opening set with her distinctive, industrial-inspired drumming and eerily familiar voice.
– Ricardo Baca
