Rebellion was a hot commodity at the Susquehanna Bank Center on Friday night, as Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails raged against enemies real and imagined.
In the midst of its second reunion, Jane's Addiction has lost whatever frail sense of purpose once held it together. Prancing around a stage adorned with Italianate curlicues, singer Perry Farrell came off as a self-satisfied pied piper, canary feathers poking out of the sides of his smirking mouth.
Drawing its set almost entirely from the early '90s albums Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual (and avoiding the product of its first reunion, Strays of 2003), the band sashayed lazily through quasi-alternative hits like "Been Caught Stealing," a pro-shoplifting anthem that packages adolescent entitlement as iconoclasm. Farrell's voice was slathered in thick delay, with an onstage mixer that swallowed the song's tenuous melody and reduced it to a sour soup.
