from The New Yorker:

FINE TUNING
Reassessing Radiohead.

…

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.

via

..I should track down these bootlegs she speaks of, oh yes..