AN ELECTRIC drone wafted through the air before Radiohead took the stage Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl. It was the ideal transonic prologue to the dearest English group's latest Los Angeles appearing. Atonal and abstract, the drone invoked contemporary classical music, scarce as the curtain of long tubes encircling the band's equipment suggested the churchy stateliness of a pipe organ. But the fuzzy sound also had an sharpness, hinting at guitar freakouts to come.
This is the tautness Radiohead rides, especially in its storied live shows: The sound it creates onstage is serious and complex, simply it as well delivers the whomp of more conventional rock. At the Bowl, beginning a two-night point of view signaling the end of a long summer of touring and festival dates, Radiohead was completely comfortable flexing both aspects of its muscle. Its 25-song set rapturous its acolytes while exposing the mutually exclusive desires this band stimulates: for live music as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and for rock'n'roll as ritual, providing reliable release.
Grinning and waving as they took the point, singer Thom Yorke and his couple looked ready to relax and stretch out, merely the twitchy, mutant rhythms of "15 Step," from the 2007 album �In Rainbows,� recalled that for Radiohead, every stretch demands an match contraction. Yorke jerked back and forward doing what some fans call his "psycho bunny dance" as the song unfolded, each element sharp-edged yet just aligned.
Radiohead's sound relies on each player's careful carrying out of a distinct line or rhythmical sequence that interlocks with every other part. It's a bodily structure more rough-cut in greco-Roman music and jazz than in rock candy, in which one riff or chord sequence is usually pushed to the forefront. (Dance music, a big Radiohead influence, is also based in pattern-making.) There's a lot to hear in most Radiohead songs; that's one reasonableness they seat sometimes feel vague.
Live, the band's commitment to complexness is bodied by frantic multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, wHO leapt from guitar to drum to keyboards to various effects boxes Sunday as the set progressed. Greenwood, who's also becoming known as an orchestral composer, represents the band's artiest ambitions. Whether obeisance his guitar on "Pyramid Song" or triggering shards of sampled dialogue on "The National Anthem," he fulfilled his role as the group's ultimate music geek.
If Greenwood represents Radiohead's flowering as an artistic creation project, Yorke brings the band drama. Self-effacing and serious in civilian life, onstage he's a natural, if overstrung, showman. As a songwriter, he specializes in emotional extremes -- the most altered states that rise internally when ordinary tribe face deathrate, wrestle with unresolved desires or take into account frustration to go too far.
"I'm an animal at bay in your parked gondola," he sang in "All I Need," his kind of love song. Yorke's back was to the crowd as he played piano, and he brought his careening tenor to a murmur; yet he still came across as intense. Like many initially awkward performers who've mellowed in time, Yorke has found a way to reconcile his dislike of rock-star poses with his impulse to put on a indicate. His gracelessness now seems reflective of the human condition, not just eccentricity.
The band's other members offer crucial livelihood -- non an easy labor in this ambitious group. The rhythm incision of Colin Greenwood on bass and Phil Selway on drums interact with the music's electronic rhythms in shipway that raise and expand upon them. On guitar and personal effects pedals, Ed O'Brien was not only Greenwood's able second, he provided some of the basic elements that associate Radiohead to traditional rock.
Sunday's set included enough aged songs to show how much the band's guide has changed since former albums like "OK Computer." The 1997 hit "Paranoid Android," performed as part of the encore, is a multi-part song suite that's challenging to execute, but it does provide a conventional climax and some rousing chances to sing on. Songs from "In Rainbows" proved attention-getting but not as releasing, getting people dancing simply earning fewer passionate cheers.
Pushing its consultation to listen in new ways, Radiohead has earned its reputation as one of the era's majuscule live acts of the Apostles. But that old craving for songs with big hooks and stomping choruses lingers, and the band is bright to serve it too. That organ set turned out to be the background for a selfsame impressive arena-rock light show; several Beatles-esque riffs and soulful melodies made it into the mix too.
And you know what? There was noneffervescent plenty of room for drone.
ann.powers
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