If Radiohead is a critics' band, and nothing more, then there were thousands of happy critics in the audience tonight. And if they're an art band, don't bother calling the Guggenheim. Despite their alleged craftiness with  knobs, switches, and keyboards in the studio,  the reluctant rock stars from Oxford are, in the flesh, a guitar band. True, a twisted one. But a guitar band nonetheless. Think of Pink Floyd and Sonic Youth coming to loggerheads at a Red House Painters' job site.

Playing material from across the broad palette of their three celebrated records, Thom Yorke and his cohorts were confident enough to recognize the audience's silence as reverence rather than boredom. The incredible diversity of Radiohead's material (especially manifest on OK Computer, their current disc) can be attributed to two things that were plainly evident tonight:  the infinite range of singer Thom Yorke and guitarist/keyboardist/glockenspieler Jonny Greenwood. It seems a shame they bothered playing "Creep" at all, the instant hit that almost derailed them on their 1993 debut Pablo Honey. They did, but at least they saved it for an encore.

Indeed, despite the bottom-heavy, controlled chaos of such recently minted classics as "Karma Police," "Paranoid Android,"  and "Let Down," Greenwood's Telecaster married to a bank of Vox amplifiers (good on ya chap!) rang like a siren in the frame of the State Theater's gilded proscenium.  Good thing this reviewer had his ears stopped up with plugs, or I might have crashed the boat on this sexy, heady stuff.

-Hans Eisenbeis

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10.97