North by Northeast, the nifty Toronto indie music festival, is happening this weekend. A couple hundred bands, playing across a couple dozen clubs, it’s a chance to see some very good (and occasionally very bad) up-and-coming bands. It’s great fun. But this year, it’s going to suck.
As good as some of the bands are, none of them are Radiohead. And when you go and see Radiohead on Thursday, and anyone else on Friday (and possibly Saturday), they’re going to look pretty sucky.
The last time I saw Radiohead, they were merely good, bogged down by performing in the crappy SkyDome and touring an album I wasn’t terribly enthused about. I almost wasn’t going to go to this show, after tickets to the two Hummingbird Centre gigs sold out in about .05 seconds, but a friend had an extra ticket and offered it to me. You really can’t say no to Radiohead, and a good thing – they were back in top form last night.
The new material they’re debuting sounded pretty good: Much simpler and more low-tech than their recent albums, very rhythm-driven on a few songs. This may be the album full of three-minute pop songs they’ve been talking about since OK Computer. Also, a foray into surf music. Brand new songs seldom have the same punch as the classics; what’s interesting and promising now will doubtless be superb the next time they tour. I have no idea what any of them were called, being able to make out very little of what Thom Yorke was saying, but I imagine most, if not all, will be on the new album.
And the old stuff was, of course, pure gold: They played Fake Plastic Trees five songs into the set, which is a good sign when you can make the audience cry in less than half an hour. Heavy on OK Computer: Climbing Up The Walls, Karma Police (which turned into a sing-a-long; very eerie to hear 2,000 people singing “this is what you get / when you mess with us”), Lucky (even spookier and darker than before), Paranoid Android (to close out the main set), then Let Down in the encore. Just also showed up in the encore, as did a very dark You and Whose Army, and the second encore consisted of a three-drummer performance of There There.
The only songs really missing were How to Disappear Completely and National Anthem, which they played the night before. Would have been nice to hear The Bends, but now I’m just being greedy.
Also, I bought buttons and a poster. Huzzah for Stanley Donwood.