Beside You In Time

Today I picked up a copy of Beside You In Time, a concert DVD just released by Nine Inch Nails.

I saw this group twice last year, in Cincinnati at the beginning of summer then in Camden in the fall. Both concerts were good, the one in Cincinnati was excellent as it had a superior set list (lots of powerful songs, almost no fluff), whereas the set list for Camden featured less of the latest album With_Teeth and more from The Fragile (my personal favorite album, so I can't complain too much). Both shows also had different presentations, the Cincinnati show featured what appeared to be fractured, stylized "teeth" above and below the stage that lit up strategically, plus in the middle of the show a translucent curtain covered the stage and images were projected onto it. In Camden a large digital screen filled the background (I think it's the same one from the Fragility tour), plus a metal curtain covered the front of the stage at times (the kind that protects store fronts in bad areas), this had lights on it that turned on so precisely that they were used to render crude images onto the curtain.

Okay, that's a lot of boring explaination. The point is, the DVD was filmed during the first ("stronger set list") leg of the tour, which it represents very nicely. There are some additional songs included as bonus tracks, all from the second ("Fragility") leg. These include Non-Entity, a track that doesn't appear on any NIN album.

My favorite concert DVD of all time is Pink Floyd's Pulse; Beside You In Time ranks a very close second. For anyone who's really, really into Nine Inch Nails, this is a better DVD than And All That Could Have Been (from the Fragility tour).