Music: Radiohead is today's Pink Floyd

1. FINE TUNING
Reassessing Radiohead.
by SASHA FRERE-JONES

Radiohead doesn’t sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years—even though the spacious, colorfully ambient music that the group has been making lately is unlike the traditional guitar rock it débuted with. Last year, Spin voted Radiohead’s 1997 album, “OK Computer,” the No. 1 album of the past twenty years, and this month readers of NME , the influential British weekly, voted it the fourth-best album of all time, behind Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe” and two Beatles albums. “OK Computer” is this generation’s “Dark Side of the Moon”—complex and catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album every day. I seem to know about a hundred of these fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.

The lead singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, has essentially three singing styles: a tired snarl, a reedy drone, and a light falsetto. His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan. On early Radiohead albums, Yorke’s lyrics were sombre expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work. After that, his lyrics became shorter and more oblique, often ending in sentence fragments that were repeated again and again, as if such persistence would give the words greater meaning. (“I will eat you alive,” he groans fifteen times in “Where I End and You Begin,” from 2003.) While Yorke sings, the band makes a wide, soupy sound that seems both a product of and an invitation to stoned passivity.

Yet several of the band’s songs got lodged in my head, and after seeing Radiohead perform three times in the past two weeks and listening repeatedly to its recordings—including Yorke’s plangent, largely electronic new solo album, “The Eraser”—I’ve discovered that with each successive record the fog around the music dissipates a little and Radiohead’s luminous teamwork comes more clearly into view.

I still don’t like Yorke’s lyrics, and I wish that the melancholy that Radiohead favors were not the status quo for so many rock bands. But then the group, which consists of four men in addition to Yorke, is not, strictly speaking, much of a rock band: catharsis, speed, and violence are generally absent from its work. Radiohead’s gift is in creating compositions thick with intricate harmonies. At a performance in Boston earlier this month, the melody of “Fake Plastic Trees,” from the 1995 album, “The Bends,” sounded like the second theme of a Schubert string quartet: Yorke’s voice mimicked the timbre and varied dynamics of a violinist bowing. While deforming the words, he revealed the melody’s elegance, which I couldn’t hear before I saw him sing it. Yorke, as his early sponsor Michael Stipe once did, plays his voice the way his bandmates play their instruments, and he has impressively consistent pitch. Radiohead sounds like an instrumental band that happens to have a singer.

In Boston, the stage was decorated with ten rhomboid-shaped screens, which hung behind the musicians. At first, the screens were covered with glowing green dots. Later, they displayed closeup video images of the band members, or parts of them—the drummer Phil Selway’s hands, Yorke’s head from below, the neck of Colin Greenwood’s bass guitar. Live, the band is as fluid and sparkly as it can be arid and mopey on recordings. Yorke does much more than sing. By the fifth song, he had already played guitar, keyboards, and a pared-down drum set. For the airy, gorgeous “Morning Bell,” from “Kid A” (2000), he was in his falsetto mode, singing brightly and playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano, while Selway locked into a clipped pattern and Greenwood plucked a small, hopeful figure high on the neck of his bass.

The band is recording a new album, and on its current tour is trying out at least twelve new songs. Several reprise the hushed, hypnotic mood of “Amnesiac” (2001) and “Hail to the Thief” (2003). The lovely “Videotape,” which invokes death and Mephistopheles (Yorke opens with “When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my videotape”), slowly ramps up and then down, the guitars and the drums bobbing around Yorke’s piano chords, emphasizing different beats of the rhythm, as if three songs were slowly becoming one.

Most of the new songs are surprisingly upbeat. “15 Step” pivots on a stuttering drum-machine pattern and prompted Yorke to dance across the stage in a happy jig, his arms raised above his head like a club kid’s. For “Bodysnatchers,” Yorke began alone, playing a short, bluesy riff—a surprisingly conventional figure. Then the band joined in: Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, both on guitar, and Phil Selway, who launched into a single-minded Krautrock drumbeat. At first, Yorke’s melody sounded like a paraphrase of George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You,” but, as the notes smeared into one another, Yorke sang what may be the ultimate Radiohead lyric: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, I am trapped in this body and can’t get out.” After a few verses, he worked himself up to a peak of wordless sound, while the guitars played odd, dissonant chords. Suddenly, the guitars dropped back in quiet unison, then surged forward again for an intense but brief coda that was as close to straight rock and roll as anything the band played that night.

More typical was the arrangement for “Everything in Its Right Place,” a pulsing song built around Yorke’s gentle vocals and twinkly electric piano chords, which recalled Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way.” O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood—Colin’s brother and the band’s unofficial co-leader—were on opposite sides of the stage, each hunched over a small electronic box called a Kaoss pad that allowed them to record and manipulate samples of Yorke’s piano and singing. When the band left the stage, the devices remained, playing the distorted bits in an endless loop.

After a second encore, Yorke came to the front of the stage, grinning widely. The crowd howled. He rubbed his hands together, as if they were cold, and held them up, palms out, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. It seemed spontaneous, half greeting, half nervous tic, and the audience responded by holding out their palms to him. Smiling, Yorke repeated the gesture three times.

Radiohead has much in common with the Grateful Dead, including passionate fans who follow the band from city to city, trade bootleg recordings of shows, puzzle out the meanings of the band’s cryptic lyrics, and (in Boston, at least) dance badly while smoking expensive-smelling weed. But Radiohead’s main interest is not improvisation, nor do the band’s affinities to modern classical music and electronica mask the fact that its dominant syntax is pop. The songs mutate briskly, and are larded with hummable motifs. Even when Jonny Greenwood is fiddling with a radio and Yorke is ululating toward the great unknown, the band obeys an internal clock that arrests its elaborations before tedium defeats wonder. Most of the songs aren’t long—only a few last more than six minutes, even live. The band plays nimble, bright-eyed arrangements of dense, heavy-lidded music.

Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label. However the band chooses to release its next record, it can still make a handsome living by touring and selling merchandise. Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.


2. Behind the Haze of Allegory, the Hard Glint of Technology -- by NATE CHINEN

Half a dozen songs into Radiohead’s show in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Thom Yorke rolled out a new lyric rooted in allegorical imagery. “When I’m at the pearly gates,” he sang, “this’ll be on my videotape.” Then, in his next breath: “When Mephistopheles is just beneath / And he's reaching up to grab me.”

The language was evasive, cryptic and archly literary, and the tone was ambiguous and anxious. In other words, it was a characteristic effort by Mr. Yorke. But within that haze there was the hard glint of something: a notion that even heaven could be mediated by technology, and well within the grasp of peril.

That’s not what you’d call a standard crowd-pleasing sentiment. But dystopian unease is to Radiohead what tumbling surf is to Dick Dale, and there were as many cheers for “Videotape” as there were for six other brand-new songs.

Judging by the applause, it’s safe to say that much of the audience was already familiar with this still-unreleased material from the currently unsigned band. Tracks have been surfacing on the web – thanks to technology a bit more advanced than videotape – since Radiohead began its current tour in Europe last month.

There was another, more important reason for the crowd response: “Videotape" was a gripping piece of music. It began austerely – Mr. Yorke’s quavering voice, a few major chords on the piano, a backwards-processed guitar – and gradually assumed the dimensions of a rock song. Its crescendo had a sense of lift and motion; surrendering to it felt like being pulled downstream.

Radiohead’s last album, 2003’s “Hail to the Thief,” was widely understood as a reconciliation of the band’s warring instincts. Ostensibly it was a return to guitar-driven rock after a pair of keyboard-heavy releases – “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” – that bent toward the ambient and abstract. But Tuesday’s concert supported the band’s conviction that it could be omnivorous, letting each side bleed into the other.

The new songs themselves were vivid proof. “Bangers and Mash” had a noisily aggressive thrust, the combined result of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s interlocking guitars, Colin Greenwood’s bass and an unrelenting drum part doubled by Phil Selway and, on a spare trap set, Mr. Yorke. As a rock tune, “Bodysnatchers” was even better, especially as it roared into the chorus. (It was also amusing to hear Mr. Yorke keening the line “I have no idea what I am talking about.”)

Sound has supplanted technique for the musicians in the band; or to be more precise, the manipulation of sound has effectively become a technique in itself. On more than one tune, Mr. Greenwood and Mr. O’Brien laid aside their guitars to squat at analog consoles, precisely shaping noise. In similar fashion, Mr. Selway blended his drumming with various electronic beats, erasing the distinctions between them.

But it was Mr. Yorke’s voice that inevitably carried the music, and one striking thing about the concert was how often he let it loose without guttural strangulation. That’s one reason why “Nude,” a new ballad, was gorgeous; during one soaring falsetto note, the band faded out, and the effect was angelic.

Of course the intent was exactly the opposite. Mr. Yorke’s last words in the song were, “You'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.” Once again he was suspended between extremes. And he seemed to revel in it, along with everyone else.