Música: An Intimate Moment With Radiohead
Thom Yorke led Radiohead Wednesday evening at the Roseland Ballroom in a show that was both intimate and big in its sound.
By NATE CHINEN
Published: September 29, 2011
“That’s show business,” Mr. Yorke concluded in mock approval. “Until then, it’s going to be like this.”
The crowd seemed fine with those conditions — thrilled, actually. This was an intimate show by Radiohead standards, and one of only two on the band’s visible horizon. (The other will be at Roseland again, on Thursday.) And when Mr. Yorke stepped to the microphone for the next song, maracas in one hand, all delays were quickly forgotten. Against a brackish hum of synthesizers, he sang in a mode of conspiratorial surrender:
I will shape myself into your pocket
Invisible
Do what you want
Do what you want
The song was “Lotus Flower,” a standout from Radiohead’s self-released eighth album, “The King of Limbs,” which dropped out of the ether early this year. And what sounded on record like a coiled contraption was made to feel darker and choppier, at least until the chorus, when Mr. Yorke sidled into his terse but radiant falsetto, his voice glowing over the room like a chandelier.
If smallness was a subtext of Wednesday’s show, it made sense: smallness is one way to understand “The King of Limbs,” which clocks in under 38 minutes, and still manages not to cohere as a whole. It’s an album seemingly designed for atomization, for absorption by the digital metabolism. (Do what you want.) It’s also a meaningful departure from the immersive, unambiguous album-ness of “In Rainbows,” which the band served up in 2007, with a twist. (Pay what you wish.)
The show opened as “The King of Limbs” does, with “Bloom,” a reverie propelled by something like refracted samba rhythm. Philip Selway, Radiohead’s regular drummer, worked busily but stoically — and so did a second drummer, Clive Deamer, hammering at a bank of electronic pads. Lending a third pair of hands on percussion was the band’s lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, momentarily hunched over a snare drum and floor tom. The bassist Colin Greenwood served as a movable anchor, shifting the emphasis bar by bar.
Pulse is another way to understand “The King of Limbs,” and by extension, this unfolding phase of Radiohead. In reductive terms, the band has shifted away again from solid riffs and toward diffuse texture, as it did in 2000, on “Kid A” (Capitol). But in the same way that the songs from “Kid A” evolved into rousing live-show fodder — in this show, Mr. Yorke began “Everything in Its Right Place” with an interpolation of “The One I Love,” by R.E.M., hardly an oblique gesture — much of the new material landed with accumulated weight. And at nearly every opportunity, Mr. Yorke was in motion, his gangly but limber dance moves pointing to the savvy behind his self-consciousness.
Some highlights were predictable: in reverse chronological order, “15 Step,” “Myxomatosis,” “Subterranean Homesick Alien.” But there was also “Staircase,” a new-album castoff that the band recently played on “Saturday Night Live.” It moved in an involuted swirl, all loopy cymbals and pecking guitars.
“The Daily Mail,” another song that didn’t make the album’s final cut, began as a wry piano ballad — “The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” cooed Mr. Yorke — and slowly ballooned to epic proportions. Radiohead had performed the song this week on “The Colbert Report,” but not with this much vehemence. After it was over, Mr. Yorke naturally put in a plug for the financial-crisis documentary “Inside Job.”
But uneasy introspection has always suited Radiohead better than moral certitude. To that end, “All I Need,” a self-effacing love letter from “In Rainbows,” was desperate and magnificent; “Codex,” an entreaty with undertones of suicide, conveyed a chilling beauty. And the first song in the encore, “Give Up the Ghost,” had Mr. Yorke on acoustic guitar, sampling his voice to produce a shimmering curtain of vocals. “Don’t haunt me,” went one falsetto refrain, spectral in itself.
What followed that was “The National Anthem,” from “Kid A,” gnarled and driving. And then came “Morning Mr. Magpie,” a whorl of guitar arpeggios and double-exposed drumming from the new album. Mr. Yorke sang its lyrics, about confronting a proverbial thief, with steel in his tone. “Now you’ve stolen all the magic,” he sang at one point, “Took my melody.”
Whatever that meant, the band piled it on, layer upon layer, sounding huge and unperturbed.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 29, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly named the song that ended the show. It was not "Morning Mr. Magpie," which ended the first encore, but not the show's second encore.
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