Radiohead/ Black Keys
I nearly cried at Radiohead's Tuesday night show at the Theater at Madison Square Garden.
But unlike past shows - their Garden arena date in 2003, their Roseland appearance in 2000 or even their Radio City gig in 1998 - the emotion didn't derive from shared experience or feelings of hope in the face of difficult times.
Nope - it was a sheer sense of dread.
Radiohead isn't touring this summer to promote a record. They don't even have a record label right now and the only new product is singer Thom Yorke's solo album, from which they didn't play a single song.
They're not in it for the money, either. They probably could have filled the Garden arena twice over, instead of this relatively tiny two-night run at the Theater - which sold out faster than Yorke's face transforms from lazy-eyed somnambulism into a sneer.
The band is calling this 24-city jaunt through Europe and North America a "warm up" as it prepares to finish its first studio album since 2003's
Hail to the Thief. So a full third of the two-hour set wound up dedicated to new songs, some of which are sterling and some of which still need proper hashing out.
Unlike material from the band's two masterworks,
The Bends and OK Computer, most of the eight new songs played Tuesday offer up a completely unleavened take on Yorke's particularly toxic dystopian vision. While "15 Step" opened with an organic, neo-soul tinged groove, it quickly devolved into layers of looped keyboards and static-filled effects.
"Arpeggi" imagined the shards of a broken relationship as Yorke sang "Everybody leaves if they get the chance and this is my chance" over Jonny Greenwood's chiming guitar pattern. It was one of many heartbreaking lyrics joined to mournful melodies that would later be drowned out by Greenwood and Ed O'Brien pushing their guitars into peals of feedback.
If there was light in these new songs, it came at the end with "House of Cards," about domestic life teetering on the edge of chaos. Though the lyric was dark, York's falsetto melody and the earnest simplicity of the band's '70s soft-pop groove sold the piece.
Otherwise, it was the kind of show where the girls dance emphatically to songs about mental breakdowns ("Everything in its Right Place") or yell "Whooo!" for a chorus like "And either way you turn, I'll be there/Open up your skull, I'll be there/Climbing up the walls."
That's what you have to do when a band's bleak perspective is so relentless. And Radiohead seems to be straying further from the delicate balance that once made their songs both harrowing and inspirational.
While the boys from Oxford should be applauded for mounting such a challenging show, they'd also be served to remember that their sad-sack instincts sometimes go too far. Why would any band that doesn't worship Satan want to close a concert with a song like "How To Disappear Completely," a haunting anthem of self-negation and disaffection?
"I'm not here," York [sic] sang. "This isn't happening."
If only it were true.
MadisonSquare Garden Theatre
New York
June 13, 2006
Isaac Guzman