Radiohead pushes buttons

Suffolk Downs
Boston
August 14, 2001

Radiohead has spent the past several years, and two CDs Kid A and Amnesiac, moving away from pop-rock and semiaccessible ideas, pursuing a more intimate, ambient and yet dissonant and often damaged sound. Call them the anti-U2 of today - or, perhaps, the U2 of the mid- late '90ss. As with U2 of that time, Radiohead now doesn't sell quite as many discs as it did before art attacked in a big way, but a rabid audience has hung on and cares very much. A sold-out crowd of 25,000 packed Suffolk Downs last night. At the band's request, the first 4,000 fans to arrive at the show were given wristbands allowing them access to an inner arc; others, some pinned against the barricade, had the rest of racetrack. (Beer drinkers were sequestered in the back.)

It was the English quintet's first area stop in three-plus years. The two-hour show - we left during the first encore to make deadline - was spectacularly, if starkly, staged with a series of horizontal and vertical lighting strips behind the band. Creative, single-color video carried close-up and non-cliched images on either side of the stage. Chemical smoke occasionally wafted across the stage. The sound was crystalline, with the instrumental separation, clarity, and volume in sync and at an A-level. And in the midst of it all was the fragile, pained-looking Thom Yorke: the singer who consciously deemphasizes lead vocals. (Yorke also plays guitar and keys.)

Enigmatic and riveting, calming and chaotic, Radiohead pushed a lot of buttons, beginning with the distorted bass throb of "National Anthem," the fractured tone and drone of "Airbag," and the chiming, atmospheric "Morning Bell." Thematically, angst and alienation were in the air, occasionally sprinkled with anger (a "Get off my case" rant in "Knives Out"). Musically, Radiohead keyed in on texture and jarring arrangement as much as it did melody. Yorke, a bleater, stretched many notes out till the bitter end - singing "Nothing at aaaalll!" in "Street Spirit" [sic] - indulging in the pathos.

Radiohead - as ever powered by guitarist/synthesists Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood, bassist Colin Greenwood, and drummer Phil Selway - packs a lot of musical information into its songs. The lyrics take a backseat. Even though the vocal mix was clear, the lyrics came across in bits, fragments. Radiohead is implicitly suggesting its music is not summed up lyrically, or easily. The band has drawn a few cards from Brian Eno's book of oblique strategies. Why not be cryptic?

It also has taken cues from the late-period Beatles, especially Abbey Road (sans humor). Radiohead moves among spare, desolate-sounding piano melodies, triple guitar rave-ups, and soaring crescendos full of grandeur. To its credit, the band neither shoved the latest CDs down our throats nor ignore them. "Paranoid Android" slayed us near the end, and "Everything in Its Right Place" closed the pre-encore segment with an electronica fest. Overall, it was a contradictory, though ultimately satisfying, affair. No extraneous prattling to the audience involved. It was dazzling and remote at the same time, a post-modern experience not unlike a concert by one of Radiohead's forebears, Pink Floyd. Shine on.

Jim Sullivan

Boston Globe
15.08.01