No Alarms and a Few Surprises at Radiohead’s Portland Show (Sun April 9, Moda Center)

All photos by Christopher Garcia Valle.

On Sunday night Radiohead played their first Portland show in more than two decades. During those intervening years, the English band has evolved in terms of venue capacity—going from La Luna in 1996 to a sold-out Moda Center in 2017—and sound, dispensing with the guitar-based popcraft of ’90s warhorses like “Black Star” in favor of artier explorations of aural terrain. If this made for an unconventional arena show, it also made the more upbeat portions of the set stand out in relief; (relative) rockers like “I Might Be Wrong” and “There There” were the clear highlights of the night.

It took a while to get there. Starting with the drifting “Daydreaming,” the show got off to a positively crawling start, and the first half of the set favored the amniotic, we-are-suspended-in-fluid un-songs of Radiohead’s last three albums. Signs of life started during an emphatic “Bloom” and from then on Radiohead locked into a show that matched the cavernous space. Not that fans cared one way or the other; while they eventually got their blood pumping during a mid-set “Everything in Its Right Place” (a pretty weird song to clap along to, when you think about it), the diehards initially seemed almost too rapt, as if every weird sonic crumb and arty left turn was meant to be absorbed in cautious, brow-furrowing awe.

Thom Yorke kept the stage banter to a minimum (of the possibly 50 words he said to the crowd over the course of the night, 35 of them were “hello” and a further eight “thank you”). Still as unconventional a frontman as ever, he emphasized his wordless falsetto, sounding like a mewling kitten drifting higher and higher in an untethered balloon. Jonny Greenwood put his entire elbow into his guitar playing, looking not so much like he was strumming the strings as sawing through blocks of ice, every upstroke timed impeccably to a tasteful hair flip. The rest of the group didn’t draw too much attention to themselves—bassist Colin Greenwood huddled over Philip Selway’s drums, the two playing in tight sync inches away from each other. Ed O’Brien and touring percussionist Clive Deamer kept to their parts with taste and minimum flash.

If the trudging first half of the show felt a little overbearingly sad, the second half proved that Radiohead could be crowd-pleasers when they chose to be. Not that the songs got any happier—they just became reflections of the crowd and the shared group energy rather than introspective yawns on behalf of Yorke and the band. Amnesiac’s “I Might Be Wrong” was the highlight, a simple blues riff played dizzyingly fast over a relentless, chopped-up backbeat. The first encore’s “Burn the Witch” was almost as good, chucking the strings from the version on A Moon Shaped Pool in favor of a triple-guitar attack from Jonny Greenwood, Yorke, and O’Brien. Despite these fiery moments, Radiohead still retreated into the gelatinous sound of their android lullabies, closing the main set with a milk-thick “Nude” and the first encore with a muted “Lotus Flower.” It was almost as if they didn’t want to whip the fans into too much of a frenzy just before leaving the stage.

And yet Radiohead closed the show with as big a concession as they could have possibly made. The second encore ended with that song—yep, despite the fact that they supposedly “never” play it (they do, a reasonable amount), Radiohead acknowledged that 21 years in between Portland shows really was far too long, offering up “Creep” as an apology and thank you. And it sounded really, really good. The distorted lightning-cracks of the verse and the soaring bridge felt vital and alive, the farthest thing from perfunctory. With it, Radiohead ended the show on a high note, suggesting that in the context of a basketball arena, bluntness and directness are much more effective than ambiguous whorls of sound.

Opening band Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis provided a warm-blooded counterpoint to Radiohead’s calculated reserve. The Israeli band’s unconventional instrumentation (dulcimer, strings, electric guitar) and microtonal intervals congealed into an accessible variety of globe-spanning pop.