are are the bands that surpass the studio and surmount the stage. More rare are the occasions that such bands are heard in Salt Lake City. But such an occasion occurred when Radiohead stopped at the USANA Amphitheater as a part of its world tour.

My biggest beef with rock concerts is simple: too noisy. Yeah, I know, I sound like a crotchety old man or something. But much to my dismay, this 20-something thinks some of the music that represents “us” is just too noisy. Before you get all up in my grill about my words of blasphemy, hear me out. What I mean by noisy isn’t loud. Loud and noisy are different. I have been to many classical and jazz concerts that were loud, but not noisy. Noisy is overblown dB with feedback that extends into the stratosphere. Noisy is poor micing (pronounced Mike-ing), which is usually results in the former. Noisy is screaming. Noisy is a fuzzy, nondescript bass line supporting upper register power chords. Noisy is basically crap.

To achieve a full sound by way of careful micing, mixing, instrument registration and scrupulous writing is the ultimate task for the ultimate musician. A great recording engineer can make any crappy band sound incredible. But this great sound is often sacrificed at the venue, where a weak replacement of noise shortchanges it, in part due to poor musicianship on account of the band.

It would be an injustice at this point to say that a live band should sound like their studio recordings. Contrarily, the band should sound significantly better than the LP found in the record store. This is often not the case. Most of the time we are just so excited to see our idols in the flesh we don’t hold them accountable in concert for their supposed musicality displayed in the studio.

The concert covered the gamut of the Radiohead discography to date, from The “end of grunge” rock sound of The Bends, to the dabbling of electronics of Kid A and Amnesiac, to the hybrid of styles in the recent release Hail to the Thief.

Most of the show consisted of the tracks from Hail to the Thief and a great handful of tunes from previous albums, excluding Pablo Honey. The band members opened the show with “There, There,” a unique piece that required the Greenwood brothers to come out on stage playing two low-tom drums. After Thom Yorke crooned the opening tune they began immediately with “2+2=5,” the first track on Thief. This rhythmically intense piece begins in a 7/8 meter that propels the music forward to a great flash of lights and a change to the more common time of 4/4.

Other stand out songs include a powerful rendition of “My Iron Lung” from The Bends, “Paranoid Android” from OK Computer and a charming performance of “You and Whose Army” from Amnesiac. The encores brought about great performances of the rhythmically complex “Pyramid Song,” “Dollars and Cents” and to finish things up, “Everything In Its Right Place.”

Yorke and Co. stifled my gripes about rock concerts. If there is a central core to the music of Radiohead, it is craft and musicianship. There weren’t any cheap imitations of the well-recorded studio tracks. The stage was simply full of great musicians who demonstrated that a recording engineer isn’t necessary to make great music. No gimmicks, no ranting to the audience aimlessly, no tangents of drunkenness—just great music-making, in theory and performance. Noise it was not, music it was.
christian@red-mag.com