photo credit: sasha ramos

Last Saturday marked the third stop for Radiohead, on a tour in support of their highly divisive eighth album that was less a bang and more a whimper upon its hushed release. A featherlight slight in comparison to their previous works, The King of Limbs was an icy, insular affair, submerged in the electronic rhythmic and percussive auras frontiered by Kid A. Expectations for the band’s live show was that of an ambient atmosphere, anchored by chilling synths and pre-programmed beats. What the seasoned English band delivered was a fiery, eruptive experience that breathed warm life into The King of Limbs, inducting it into the menagerie of Radiohead classics.
Hit the jump for the full recap.

– sunbear

photo credit: sasha ramos

Houstonians are, if anything, an impertinent people, so anxious to flow into familiarity and discount the alien, that any aural concert moment not filled with blistering guitars and stock anthems is overtaken with menial chit-chat and turned backs. The surprise of the night turned out, not to be the first time performance of “Paranoid Android” on this tour, or the hefty half of the very-human In Rainbows that was played, but how smoothly the almost-sold out arena melted into the band’s newest material, everyone well into their Radiohead comfort-zone and sated at the hands of Thom Yorke and company.

The whole The King of Limbs was performed for this tour, with a great emphasis on the dynamics and intricate instrumentation of the six men on stage. The gentle moan of Thom Yorke was less a force and more a reverb-drenched guide for the dour atmospherics of the album. Jonny Greenwood, long renowned for his guitar playing, spent the majority of his stage-time knelt before a slew of pedals and processors, his electronic textures as indispensible as his riffs once were. Songs like “Bloom” and “Codex” flourished in a live setting, the former’s dual drummers (Portishead’s Clive Deamer is a replicant of Phil Selway, right?) beating a tangled anxiousness into the song; the latter a gentle, stoic ballad that was made all the most inviting by the (relatively) low lit, spotlight performance.

And let’s talk stage production for a minute: Radiohead much loved LCD screens made a huge splash on the In Rainbows Tour four years ago. Updated for a new era, a silent army of floating screens, changing position and angle with each song, created a sort of fractured personal diary for the band, each one projecting an extremely tight shot of the individual band members and their instruments. From where I sat in the high rises, I could actually see that no one was having as good a time performing live as the hulking Ed O’Brien

photo credit: sasha ramos

The LCD backdrop went into epileptic overtime as the band played favorites “Myxomatosis “ and the aforementioned “Paranoid Android,” barraging the eye with kaleidoscopic schizophrenia. The frenzied maracas of Limbs’ “Feral” proved to be the missing-link segue into the blistering “Idioteque,” the night’s handclap-happy song. Thom’s now famous dancing, a convulsive white-dude jive, was in full effect as he jounced and jolted to the band’s more spirited songs (though it was almost overshadowed by his newly minted ponyail). The night’s energy came in waves, the ebb and flow between the subdued restraint of Limbs and the elegant urgency of the band’s back catalog.

Then came the just nightcap of “Paranoid Android” for the finale of two encore numbers, a revitalizing reminder that at its core, Radiohead are indeed a rock band, capable of going full-on analog and shaking a house to its foundation. Over the course of two hours, Houston witnessed every facet of Radiohead’s emotional depth, their scientific precision of crafting atmosphere and texture, but, and we’re not shy to say it, are fondest of the full-on throttling of an arena-sized rock anthem.

Set list:
Bloom
Little By Little
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Morning Mr. Magpie
The Gloaming
15 Step
Codex
Cut a Hole
These Are My Twisted Words
Airbag
Identikit
Lotus Flower
There There
Feral
Idioteque
Reckoner

Encore 1:
Separator
All I Need
Myxomatosis
Everything in Its Right Place

Encore 2:
Give Up the Ghost
Nude
Paranoid Android