Jonah’s Wednesday Night Concert Review Series: Radiohead!
Two weeks ago, I enjoyed the musical stylings of MGMT, a two-man synth pop group with a loyal, growing following. The show was at the tiny Paradise club in Boston, and I was standing no more than 10 feet from the stage. Good times were had by all, in an intimate setting.
Two weeks later, I trekked to Montreal, Parc Jean Drapeau on Ile Ste. Hélène more specifically, to see Radiohead. The crowd was estimated at 35,000, though it felt like 100,000. It was raining, it was ridiculously muddy, and people were sardined in together as far as the eye could see.
It was an impossibly great time.
Since I’ve already indicated that I’m not a real concert reviewer, I’ll let the professionals at the Montreal Gazette chime in with some choice excerpts on what they called “The concert of the summer”:
This was not an obvious show, nor an easy one, even by Radiohead standards. Bigger than ever, the band continues to push boundaries and take its audience to unexpected places – bleak sonic landscapes in which Yorke’s frail warble becomes just another – albeit the most important – emotive texture.
Yeah, what he said.
Highlights for me:
–“My Iron Lung”, which offered the first opportunity of the night to really rock out. This is one of Radiohead’s older songs, from their second album “The Bends”. It’s not necessarily my favorite. But more than just about any other band I’ve seen, Radiohead has a huge gap between how much you’ll enjoy their studio recordings vs. their live shows. The band can sound ethereal and overly electronic at times, especially if you’re not a devotee. If you saw them playing “My Iron Lung” live last night, you’d be an instant convert.
–“Fake Plastic Trees”. If you don’t like this song, we can’t be friends. Those are my rules.
–“The National Anthem”. I always get an extra kick out of seeing a concert in my hometown. That was especially true when I saw Arcade Fire in Montreal last year. Since they’re a Montreal-based band it was a homecoming for them too, with lead singer Win Butler mixing in a few words of well-placed French when needed. Thom Yorke will never be confused with a pure laine Québecois (not that Butler is either) but brought some local flavor to this classic Radiohead tune by interspersing some electronically recorded French dialogue in the background of the song’s opening riffs. This wasn’t Parisian la-dee-dah Français either–it was the rougher, unmistakable version only found in la belle province.
–“Karma Police”. One giant sing-along.
…This is what you’ll get, when you meeeeesssssss…with us…
–“You and Whose Army”. See that creepy super close-up of Thom Yorke’s eyeballs in that link? He did that last night for this song. By the time he gets to the words “Holy Roman Empire”, you remember how one skinny dude from the UK can captivate a bazillion soaking wet, muddy Montrealers in a park on an island on a Wednesday night.
Angèle took some great photos as well as a terrific video at various points in the evening.
Here’s a shot of the stage, with the band’s cool lighting set-up in full effect.
A pleasant surprise…fireworks! Every year, Montreal hosts an international fireworks festival, in which different nations compete with their own spectacular entries. Coincidentally (or not), last night brought both the closing festivities of the festival as well as the Radiohead concert, within very close promixity of each other.
At one point, Yorke started laughing in the middle of a song, stuck on the lyric “fireworks” just as an explosion of yellows and purples rang out to the right of us. I got the feeling he found it more annoying than funny. Still, it was a really great (and unexpected) accompaniment to the show.
The biggest highlight of the night for me was my favorite Radiohead song (especially live): “Paranoid Android”. I’ll link to a clip of the song in its entirety here.
But major kudos to Angèle for producing a clip with pretty darn good audio and video (considering how far we were from the stage)…
On a scale of 1 to 10, I give last night’s Radiohead concert an eleventy.
Just when I thought we had fairly similar interests on a lot of things, you have to go and like Radiohead on me. I feel somewhat let down.
(And full disclosure, the best concerts I’ve seen this year? Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs just two weeks apart in southern Ohio. Oh yeah, I’m one of the cool kids…)
(And okay, fine, I’ll admit it, the song Paranoid Android is pretty good… but I’m drawing the line at that.)
Radiohead is the best entity on planet earth…I’m insanely jealous.
My third or fourth time seeing them (can’t remember). Previous shows were all at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., which is a TREE-mendous venue for a concert.
If any readers have extra tickets for other Wednesday night shows with cool bands playing by the way, I’d be happy to make this a regular feature of the blog.
Dan, to each his own. I do like some old stuff too, for what it’s worth–Zeppelin especially.
Found some great YouTube clips from the Montreal show, figured I’d share:
Fake Plastic Trees
My Iron Lung
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
15 Step
All I Need
The National Anthem
Optimistic
For some depressing reason, Radiohead isn’t touring within a 300 mile radius of me this year (usually they go to SF, where I saw them 2 years ago). However, they do go to the Hollywood Bowl (where I’ve never been). I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and they play on an inconvenient Sunday/Monday night, but now you’re really tempting me to fly down there talking about how great the venue is. Ugh.
So I wandered over here because your previous post was linked to by Baseball Think Factory and then I saw the Radiohead post was a little light bulb went off in my head that made want to read it.
‘Course it’s making me regret that I missed them at Lollapalooza here in Chicago a couple weeks ago. I figured, eh, seen ‘em four times, kinda short on cash these days….maybe a bad call. Best show I saw was at the Beacon Theater in NYC in June of ’03. Best clip, though, is this one:
Great clip, thanks for that…today seems to be 1994 Day at JonahKeri.com!
It’s a shame Radiohead plays very little Pablo Honey stuff live these days. I remember we saw them at Hollywood Bowl a few years ago. Killer show. But what floored people was when they played “Creep”. It’s a great song of course, though not my favorite. But it’s just so, so rare that they’d play it. Like Zeppelin playing Stairway, it’s an early, recognizable hit that they seem determined to bury. Might be overplayed on the radio, but still unbelievably cool when they broke it out that night. The crowd went nuts.