last night's gig

Radiohead Finally Slip Up and Play a Subpar Show

Photo: AFP


Just kidding! As you might have heard by now, Radiohead came through Jersey City to play back-to-back shows this weekend, headlining All Points West on Friday and Saturday. Results were predictably fantastic. Set lists tilted heavily toward last year’s In Rainbows (“Weird Fishes”, “Bodysnatchers,” “Videotape,” everything else on that album, etc.), but the band also delivered enough greatest hits to appease any casual Radiohead fans in attendance (if, in fact, such a person actually exists). Dancing exuberantly during “Paranoid Android” and “Cymbal Rush,” and sweetly crooning on ballads like “All I Need” and “Fake Plastic Trees,” Thom Yorke capably romanced both day’s crowds into an awed submission, punctuating songs with polite “thank you”s and at least one “cool beans.”

As one might reasonably expect from Radiohead by now, the visuals were totally awesome: The monitors broadcast a mix of Technicolor band shots and black-and-white close-ups — Phil Selway counting off, Colin Greenwood bobbing his head along. Green laser raindrops poured down onstage during “The Gloaming.” There was a phenomenal moment on Friday when, during “You and Whose Army,” the screen split into sixteen sets of Thom’s eyeballs, underlining the scariness of that lyric about “ghost horses.”

Dedications included “Airbag” to Saturday night’s openers Kings of Leon, and Friday’s “Pyramid Song” went out to “a hectic city and those moments you try to find some peace.” An incendiary version of “Idioteque” closed the two-night run, and Thom sent the sated crowd back across the river with “Sweet Dreams.” Sleepy, satisfied concertgoers stumbled back to the ferry under a shining orange half-moon, the night’s final visual effect. —Lauren Salazar

Radiohead Finally Slip Up and Play a Subpar Show