Orange County Register

At the Hollywood Palladium on Wednesday night, 44-year-old Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor –- an alt- rock forebear thanks to aggressively angry electro-laced ’90s hits like “Head Like a Hole” and “Closer” –- opened the show (as he did recently in NYC) by playing all of 1994’s The Downward Spiral, the work that propelled him into full-blown stardom in the first place.

It was an ironic move, thanks to the nature of the tour. Billed as Wave Goodbye, this run of small shows, Reznor claims, will be his last ever under the NIN moniker. (The instantly sold-out mini-tour continues tonight at the Music Box at the Fonda in Hollywood, then wraps with gigs Saturday at the Wiltern and Sunday at, appropriately, the Echoplex.)

While the band will no doubt be missed, it’s clear from this well-paced, energized yet far from brutalizing performance that his timing is just about right.

Since his band’s heyday, Reznor has transformed himself from a skinny computer geek (he played Professor Harold Hill in his high school’s production of The Music Man) into a guy who looks like the captain of the football team, his current bulkiness and wrinkles that creep across his face a visible affront to the beaten-down hostility of his earlier self. It doesn’t make the material any less effective. But it definitely has shifted some of his most beloved songs from sounding vital and meaningful to seeming nostalgically cathartic.

Unlike earlier this year, when NIN played new material in amphitheaters and festivals to much larger crowds itching for more familiar fare, at the intimate-by-comparison Palladium the group stuck mainly to crowd-pleasers, tearing into hits from throughout Reznor’s catalog even after Spiral came to its poignant end, with a hushed, moving rendition of “Hurt.” Most surprising for a man often pegged as a recluse was Reznor’s obvious desire to connect with the packed crowd; by the second song, “Piggy,” Reznor had already jumped into the crowd for a singalong, a feat he managed more than once during the two-hour set.

For a hardcore NIN fan, there likely are no complaints. Yet it’s obvious, when looking a bit more critically, that this show was missing a key part of the Nine Inch Nails formula -– namely, a sense of danger.

Early NIN shows were combustible and reckless, like a carnival rollercoaster with loose lug nuts apt to come apart at any moment. Wednesday night’s polished performance was more like a ride on Space Mountain, complete with twists (a surprise appearance from Gary Numan, whose influence on Reznor become apparent from the first drowned-synth riff of the ubiquitous ’80s hit “Cars”) and turns (the crowd response on “The Hand That Feeds” was among the biggest of the night) and an ending that came too soon. There wasn’t even an encore.

That said, in many ways this stripped-down, four-man version of Nine Inch Nails is sonically richer than any of the huge bands Reznor has traveled with before, revealing an organic softness that’s actually been there all the time.

His scream -– long a weapon rather than a tool -– now sounds almost classically bluesy at times; he’s found a sense of control rather than simply becoming completely unhinged. NIN has long suffered comparisons to dark precursors like Bauhaus and KMFDM, yet a swath of instrumentals (the title track from Spiral especially) revealed that Reznor was ahead of his time in more ways than he’s often given credit for. Radiohead may have even learned a thing or two from the atmospherics that Reznor’s compositions bring to overdriven slide guitars and carefully pummeled pianos.

This show was decidedly about looking to the past rather than the future, yet it nonetheless was also a cleansing of who Trent Reznor used to be. By announcing this as a farewell tour, it’s clear he doesn’t want to become a nostalgia act -– and who can blame him? A 44-year-old man screaming “I want to f*** you like an animal” is one thing, but a 60-year-old man doing the same thing would likely be viewed as hopelessly pathetic.

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