I Might Be Wrong - Live Recordings

About

By late 2001, Radiohead was thriving—in spite of some naysayers’ prediction. Record-label executives and critics had initially dubbed the group’s 2000 album <i>Kid A</i> “commercial suicide,” and claimed the band’s electronic volte-face had turned the band members into miserabilists—still whining about society and dejection, but now doing it in a formless me. But the back-to-back successes of <i>Kid A</i> and its follow-up, <i>Amnesiac</i>, validated the band’s new direction—as did <i>I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings</i>, an ecstatic rejoinder to those potshot. Released in the fall of 2001, it captures the euphoria that greeted the band as it mounted an extensive world tour. On these eight song, you can hear crowds screaming in fit, from the French Alps to the banks of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River. More importantly, you can hear the members themselves having a legitimate blast, adapting these amorphous songs for the stage, and digging into them with impressive improvisational gusto. “It was so much fun,” Thom Yorke later said of the <i>Kid A</i> era, “like the kids are being given the keys to the sports car.” Onstage, the band had dropped some of the more cerebral aspects of <i>Kid A</i> and <i>Amnesiac</i> for pure aggression. Yorke swivels and gasps over the blown-out bass during set opener “The National Anthem,” with Jonny Greenwood howling on the ondes Martenot like a furious ghost in the distance. For a band that had disavowed rock, the exit of “I Might Be Wrong” borders on Sonic Youth abrasion, as the guitars claw at Philip Selway’s churn. And “Idioteque,” already the seat of <i>Kid A</i>’s power, finds a new fever pitch, with Yorke sailing into paroxysms over a cavalcade of drum. The hometown Oxford crowd joins him for his devilish chant: “Take the money and run.” .

via Apple Music

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