intellectual properties

this is what you get

last night we went to see Radiohead for the first time since 2001. i got the tix from a friend as a birthday gift for Jay. Radiohead has been a part of our relationship the whole time! we listened to it while staring out the windows of the train in the Andes on the way to Machu Picchu in 2010 and i don’t think i will ever forget that soundtrack+that place+that time.

i’m not too hot on the HP Pavilion in San Jose as a venue – it’s just never gonna sound good in a hockey arena – and our seats were pretty far away so Thom Yorke looked like this weird little dancing seahorse way down there on the stage, but i have no complaints about Radiohead. they are stellar. they don’t phone it in. they are not resting on their laurels. i think it’s hard for some people to interpret when you say that music like that – hard rock music – is beautiful. but i think it is so beautiful. the music pushes all the right buttons for me in terms of what’s in the soundscape and how it’s composed together, and the lyrics. oh, thom yorke. such unapologetically romantic levity and despair.

the visual set-up was also pretty amazing, with a waterfall of programmed LEDs and moving projection screens that made for intense but beautiful designs. so kudos to whoever the lighting/visuals team is.

i realized somewhere in the middle of it that it’s been a pretty long time since i went to a concert and actually didn’t care at all what they played. they could play any of it. they could play things i’ve never heard before. didn’t care. all of it good.

but i got pretty excited when they played There There (“just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there” – which i’ve quoted many times), and when they played The Amazing Sounds of Orgy (“i want to see you smile again the day the banks collapse“, which I still have on an old t-shirt from 2001).

i was looking back through my old blog posts about radiohead, and laughed when i saw the post from 2007 about In Rainbows, complaining that it was getting too electronic. i wasn’t sure about that move – it has failed for so many other bands. but oh, they made it beautiful and now some of my favorite tracks are the most electronic ones.  Idioteque was a the final encore and that was pretty intense.

in short: great show.  i love radiohead. 4evar.

(setlist) (photos+review from SFBG)

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