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CONCERT REVIEW: Radiohead @ Susquehanna Center 6/13
Thom Yorke was ever-the-front man with his operatic yowl Yorke's during "Nude," a processed scowl through "Identikit" and a tender angelic whisper through the finale of "True Love Waits" and the twinkling "Everything in its Right Place." He pushed his voice through loops and grooved like James Brown in space to the crank of cowbells and mooning bass lines.
CONCERT REVIEW: Radiohead @ Susquehanna Center 6/13
Radiohead knows how to make an entrance — onto a stage, into a challenging esthetic wholly their own. On Wednesday night at Camden’s Susquehanna Bank Center, Radiohead — anchored by bald bookend drummer, buoyed by fluid bass lines and glitch-house ambience, led by a nervously romantic yet confidently odd crooner — stood before a multi-hued wall of lights made from 14,000 recycled plastic bottles with live moving panels of the band’s faces and designed a quiet riot that no other band could.
During its two hour+ merger of beautifully fractured noise and nuance, Britain’s ultimate alterna-art rock ensemble embraced nothing from its pre-1997 past. While an epic version of “Lucky” from OK Computer drew silent gasps from the crowd, the whooshing “Paranoid Android” — a gently eerie prog-suite that answered the question “what is Major Tom up to now?” — seemed to stun audience members who had missed the track from previous tour set lists. Instead, Radiohead basked in the mix of the gracious and the grotesque that’s been Kid A, King of Limbs and In Rainbows, its most decidedly difficult atmospheric works.
Thom Yorke was ever-the-front man with his operatic yowl Yorke’s during “Nude,” a processed scowl through “Identikit” and a tender angelic whisper through the finale of “True Love Waits” and the twinkling “Everything in its Right Place.” He pushed his voice through loops and grooved like James Brown in space to the crank of cowbells and mooning bass lines.
Yorke bobbed his ponytail, shook his tiny hips and spoke warmly to the audience on that last night of their American tour (and two nights before the tragic pre-show stage collapse in Toronto) thanking them for support and even introducing song titles (“I hope you like this”). But Radiohead was and is always a band and not a back-up for a wiry singer and the most powerful moments of the set illuminated that dynamic daringly.
With its shifting colored-stage acting as Radiohead’s seventh member, they peeled through the airy Pink Floyd-ian rush of “There There (The Boney King of Nowhere),” a multi-drummer tour-de-force if ever there was. “Bloom” started off the night with a unified stage whisper, a code amongst intimates. The grouchy blues of “I Might Be Wrong” and “Bodysnatchers” — two of a few fleeting moments where Jonny Greenwood cranked his guitar to 12 — was a ramshackle roughhouse. And the night’s most sumptuous moment, the ticklish angular “Give up the Ghost” sounded a heavenly interwoven harmony-filled sigh as it sailed mightily into the night sky of New Jersey and its cool breezes.
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