Radiohead 8-12-08

Susquehanna Bank Center · Camden, NJ

BY STEVE KLINGE

As the five Radiohead blokes walked onto the stage of the Susquehanna Bank Center, the outdoor amphitheater in Camden, New Jersey, they clapped their hands back to the crowd's ovation. It was a nice gesture: even though unlikely that it was spontaneous, the implied appreciation for their fans deflated some of the worship that the band inspires.

Not that that adulation is undeserved. By any measure of "importance" in present-day rock music, Radiohead rank at the top. Who's the competition? Dylan, Young, Springsteen of the old guard, maybe, but it's hard to name another band or artist who came of age post-1990 that commands comparable respect and burden of expectation. Wilco? Jay-Z, Kanye or M.I.A.? Before their demise, Sleater-Kinney?

I came to Radiohead relatively late. "Creep" seemed a novelty, and I admired OK Computer a lot more than I liked it. I was suspicious of its ambitious reach, which seemed too close to being Dark Side Of The Moon for the post-punk generation. Which it was, and is. And is, also, for a generation of college kids who grew up on classic rock, top 40, and hip-hop and care not a whit for punk, indie rock or anything "cool," and that's one of OK Computer's impressive feats: without compromise, it reached a wide audience of divergent tastes (if not, to judge by the Camden audience, of divergent races). Still, it took Kid A's noisy electronics to engage me, and it took seeing them live a few years later to convert me.

Jonny Greenwood did it. Greenwood plays the quiet mad scientist role in the band, handling the most significant lead guitar duties, but also moving to drum programs, samples and miscellaneous other instruments. At one point during this show, he was playing guitar while using the instrument's headstock to hit piano keys. Whether he's using a guitar or a computer, he seems to revel in the electricity of sounds even more than the notes, and it's a thrill to witness. Thom Yorke's voice and unhinged dancing command the center, but Greenwood's restless artistry pushes and pulls the songs. And the sense of self-importance that can come with Yorke's mewling voice dissipates when the band performs live. Yorke's a great singer, especially of the paranoid musings that are his specialty. Live, the heightened dynamic contrasts and emotional engagement and the visual stimuli compete more aggressively with Yorke's somber crooning for the spotlight, and that's a good thing.

The Camden show was great, but often in inverse proportion to Yorke's centrality to the song and direct proportion to Greenwood's. Not to slight Yorke's skills: "Reckoner" was a highlight, and it was basically just Yorke on electric guitar and beautiful falsetto backed by drums and various shakers. And his fish-on-a-hook, epileptic dancing in opener "15 Step" and a few others managed to appear simultaneously alien (to us) and natural (for him): he looked like he was performing a ritualistic rain dance as he got carried into "The Gloaming." But the show, 25 songs in just over two hours, let the midtempo ballads accumulate, with diminishing returns: Thumbs up for "Videotape" and "Faust Arp" (with only Greenwood and Yorke, face to face on acoustic guitars) and especially for the stunningly beautiful "No Surprises," less so for "Climbing Up The Walls," even with its spacey dub reggae undercurrent, "Nude" and "Go Slowly," which Yorke introduced by saying, "This is a slow song for a good reason," presumably because of the title.

But none of those songs opened up into new vistas, and that's what Radiohead does best. They might begin slow and stately, as on "Weird Fishes / Arpeggi," or percussive and martial, as on "There, There" with both hoodie-garbed Greenwood and guitarist Ed O'Brien flanking the stage on standing drums. But a song's defining moment comes when they interrupt the mood, as when Phil Selway's drums suddenly kicked in and Greenwood started spraying noise from his low-slung guitar on "Fishes", or when they ratchet up the song's tension, as when the melody asserted itself in "There, There." And some songs exploded from the start: a throbbing "Where I End And You Begin," a buzzy, brittle "Jigsaw," a relentless, frenetic "Bodysnatchers."

They reached back to 1995's The Bends for several nearly glammy rockers, but I would have traded a few of them for something from the forgotten Amnesiac (they also ignored Pablo Honey, but that's okay). Songs like "Just" seemed dated and straightforward amongst all the tracks from last year's In Rainbows (literally: they played the whole album) and in contrast to the electronic rhythms of "The National Anthem" or "Idioteque," both of which were amazing. It was often difficult to discern who was making what sound in those two songs, at least from my distant vantage point: Selway's drums merged with the programmed tracks Greenwood triggered, and the guitars and Colin Greenwood's bass lines often traded taking the lead lines. Even with live feeds of close-ups of the players, projected in blocks behind and at the sides of the stage, it wasn't obvious (although it was engaging to try).

In addition to the live shots, the staging included a myriad of dangling lights that framed the band in vertical strips of neon that shifted, song by song, through a rainbow of intense colors. It was a thrilling moment late in "Idioteque" when the instruments stopped, leaving just the twitchy rhythm, but the crowd's roar might have been cued by the shifting lights as much as by the music, which at that point none of the band members was actually playing. Visual stimulus was part of the show, but it supported rather than distracted.

The show ended with "Everything In Its Right Place," aptly enough, and each man successively abandoning his instrument and leaving the stage. When O'Brien and others clapped back at the audience while walking off, though, it seemed unnecessary. Radiohead had earned their final ovation with the night's work.

Not enough of the sold-out crowd witnessed Grizzly Bear's excellent opening set (the venue's parking plan makes for maddening traffic problems). The Brooklyn-based band melded high harmonies of great beauty-think My Morning Jacket or Animal Collective, at their most pastoral-with spacious, stately strumming or unusual, halting guitar chords to create unassuming, fascinating music full of ideas about space and rhythm.

Radiohead set list:

1. 15 Step

2. There There

3. Morning Bell

4. All I Need

5. The National Anthem

6. Videotape

7. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

8. The Gloaming

9. Where I End And You Begin

10. Faust Arp

11. No Surprises