Radiohead singer Thom Yorke doesn't immediately strike you as so very special. He seems diffident, just a dash of the eccentric in the way only Brits can - a slightly elfin accountant, maybe. "I'm on a roll," he sang on the opening "Lucky" at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre, but hesitantly, as if he hoped saying it would make it so. When he thanked the audience toward the end of the show - "You've been very lovely" - he sounded entirely sincere. Yet Yorke's voice, capable of everything from seraphic croons to anguished moans, seemingly issues from outside himself, jerking his wiry body about as if transported by energies not of his own manufacture. But even as he writhes and twists onstage, Yorke maintains a very British reserve; pouring out his meditations on aloneness, he remains solitary, as if the socialbility of live performance is personally inpermissible.

Playing to a sold-out crowd thick with cardigans and soccer jerseys, Radiohead was a study in contrasts. The band created painterly textures, edging chiming psychedelic notes with white-noise squeals and gargatuan Hendrix riffs with chunky whine-raps. Their big power chords simultaneously aggressive and self-effacing, Radiohead rocked out theoretically, testing and savoring their leader's terrors before airing them - and if you think that's an insult, you don't understand how much beauty pure mathematics can hold. Though there were a few too many closing rave-ups, as if they didn't trust that their message would go down without a spoonful of adrenaline, Radiohead found a ruminative groove for most of their performance: privacy as public statement. Booming the Orwellian productivity=death spoken-word track "Fitter, Happier" before taking the stage, Radiohead pointedly ignored "Creep" and brought a pained intelligence to songs from alternately droll and desperate OK COMPUTER. "Electioneering" was restarted one verse in, biting all the harder into its say-anything sarcasm; the dryly threatening "Karma Police" built into a closing feedback solo that ended mid-squeal; "Paranoid Android" slid from delicacy to brutal noise before stopping on a dime. And by the time Yorke sang "They'd shut me away/But I'd be all right" on the final encore, "Subterranean Homesick Alien," it was hard to disagree. Yorke knows that it's a cold world out there, and sometimes it's best to stay inside your head.

-Jesse Berrett

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