Radiohead/ Kid Koala/ The Beta Band
Liberty State Park
New Jersey
August 16, 2001

Liberty State Park? I must admit I didn't really have a clue what it was like, or how fun it would be to hold a rock show there. But after the fact, it's hard to conceive of a place that would have been more entertaining to be last Thursday night than on that small peninsula jutting out from New Jersey in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

This is of course because Radiohead was playing the first of two concerts here, on the tail end of a U.S. tour leg supporting the group's fifth album, Amnesiac. And beyond all the hype and the mass confusion over the band's creative urges or press stance, etc., this group flat-out rocks. The night's breathtaking two-hour, 23-song set was clearly the fruit of a band on top of its game. The quintet presented a sonically diverse buffet of songs from its last four albums (conveniently ignoring Pablo Honey) as well as a teaser of things to come, and the band members each looked to be having the time of their lives along with the audience, far from their miscast reputation as success-shunning misanthropes.

Easing my fears, the setting was beautiful, with New York's skyline lit up to the left of the stage and lady liberty to be seen through its rafters. A short set from the Beta Band - not highly memorable - coaxed the sun into setting, and the diminutive Kid Koala spun a pleasant DJ set. But the real crowd-pleaser came when the Ink Spots-blaring PA quieted, the large screens rose up, and Colin Greenwood's fuzzy bass kicked off "The National Anthem."

The elder Greenwood proved an aural highlight reel all night, his eminently grooveworthy basslines adding extra rock power to "Packt Like Sardines" and slinking funkily into "I Might Be Wrong." But his strengthened presence just served to illuminate the fact that all five players are really each excellent musicians, and learning to contribute to each song in different ways, providing Radiohead with a better blueprint than today's average rock band. Very few of their songs echo one another - note the immense difference between the solo piano take on "Like Spinning Plates" and the bounding rock epic "My Iron Lung" - and they seem to consciously be looking for ways to expand their sound.

But while they continue to exploit studio technology and experiment with electronic rhythms and such music-making toys as the Kaoss Pad and the Ondes Martenot (that huge switchboard thing you may have seen Jonny Greenwood playing on Saturday Night Live), the band has certainly not forgotten how to rock out in a live setting. Their uber-guitar-epic "Paranoid Android" felt as it should flowing off a rock stage, stirring excitement to its abrupt end. But the next tune, the sparse electro-pop raver "Idioteque" raised the energy level even further, as frontman Thom Yorke bounded across the stage like a live wire, shaking and screaming "ice age coming! ice age coming! women and children first!"

The group was equally affecting on softer, piano-based tunes "Pyramid Song" and "Everything In Its Right Place," the latter of which was preceded by a little nod to Yorke faves R.E.M.'s "The One I Love," recorded on the spot by the younger Greenwood and manipulated to hypnotic effect throughout the song.

Two encores included the third-ever performance of "Like Spinning Plates" from Amnesiac, the album version of which is a swirling, heavily treated song with backwards vocals. The live version featured just Yorke at a piano, although he did deliver the haunting lyrics with a strange clipped accent meant to recall the cadences of its studio counterpart. We also got treated to an acoustic version of the unreleased ballad "True Love Waits" which has been popping up on setlists throughout the tour.

A raucous version of The Bends' title track followed, and then the group closed out the show with "The Tourist" from OK Computer. The J.Greenwood-penned tune begs of its title character to "slow down" and enjoy life rather than zooming through it at a thousand feet per second. But as Yorke soared up to hit the chorus notes, it seemed that the crowd in Liberty State Park was indeed paying attention, and relishing the moment, witnessing one of today's best rock bands doing its thing.

Troy Carpenter

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