RIYL: Ministry, Gary Numan, free stuff you can watch on YouTube

If you want some good weed and some killer tie-dye shirts, you talk to Grateful Dead fans, but if you want state of the art A/V work (and maybe some anti-depressants), you go to Nine Inch Nails fans. Last year Trent Reznor let over 400 GB of HD footage from his Lights in the Sky tour “leak” onto torrent sites, apparently after he was unable to release an official DVD with the footage. Over the past year, various NIN fans around the world have been working on the footage, editing, color-correcting and even subtitling it for an “unofficial” release over the internet. That release, dubbed “Another Version of the Truth” finally made its way online, and it was definitely worth the wait.

The Lights in the Sky tour was Nine Inch Nails’ most ambitious yet, a choreographed spectacle that lived up to its name, thanks to multiple LED screens and some of the brightest flood lights you’ll ever be blinded by. Matching the brilliant visuals was the one of Nine Inch Nails most varied set lists to date, incorporating everything from Pretty Hate Machine to The Slip, even including a surprising amount of material from the instrumental Ghosts I-IV. It was a great show – you had to be there. But if you weren’t, this DVD comes damn close to recreating the experience. The footage is edited together great, the cuts are fast when they need to be, but more often than not the edits are lax, letting us take in the performance without added distractions. Which is good, because Trent and company were on fire for this tour. For both the quiet numbers, like the material from Ghosts, or for loud boisterous explosions of noise like “Wish,” the group is tighter than ever, and their performance are made all the more impressive by the revolutionary A/V spectacle that surrounds them (literally, they had a lot of LCD screens out there). Highlights of this include “Closer,” where Trent sings directly into a camera that projects his face across the screen behind them, distorted by the soundwaves of the music, and “The Warning,” where bright displays turn the band into silhouettes.

“Another Version of the Truth” is available online for free here in a multitude of formats, including one that you can burn to a Dual Layer DVD. A Blu-Ray is apparently coming soon. No matter what format you choose however, this is a must-own for NIN fans, and the price sure as hell is right.