Radiohead (guitarist Ed O’Brien, singer, guitarist and keyboard player Thom Yorke and bassist Colin Greenwood shown above) headlined one of the summer’s most hotly anticipated concerts Wednesday night -- a sold out affair at Auburn’s White River Amphitheatre, where England's alt-rock heroes last headlined in 2003. The band’s two-hour set was befitting of one of the World’s most critically acclaimed rock bands. It was heavier than you'd expect on the new material (unless you'd been taking sneak peaks at set lists posted on sites like AtEaseWeb.com) with the band performing most of last year’s “In Rainbows” CD. A few fan favorites were notably, signature numbers like “Paranoid Android.” But many of the new tracks were welcome additions to Radiohead's live arsenal, with ballad "Nude" and rockin' selections "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" and "Bodysnatchers" making especially big impressions. It was great to hear "Kid A" single “Optimistic,” a an excellent number I don't remember hearing the band play during the last couple of Washington stops. Click here for the entire set list.
ERNEST JASMIN

Yorke is never big on the yakkety-shmakkety between songs. But his chattiest moment during the beginning of the second encore Wednesday night. “Seattle is known for a lot of things,” he said, specifically citing Jet City protests against the World Trade Organization and “what a corrupt, malignant organization it is.” The singer “You and Whose Army,” from 2001’s “Amnesiac” album, to anyone in the crowd who had protested WTO. And as on previous tours, Yorke comically mugged for a camera that provided goofy piano-view close-ups on the big screen behind him during that song. His second noteworthy bit of crowd interaction came during “Faust Arp,” which Yorke and Jonny Greenwood performed sans band mates. And how much do fans love Yorke? They cheer even louder when he had a brain fart. The guy forgot the lyrics to the song twice, playfully waving it off the second time. "Aw, f---- it,” he declared before spinning back around to the mike and tearing into the wordy number anew. This elicited the loudest cheers of the evening to that point, with fans encouraging him as he finally conquered the blasted thing. But mostly Yorke let the music do the talking, occasionally breaking into that endearingly weird running monkey dance he does during numbers like "Idioteque."
ERNEST JASMIN

Resident genius Jonny Greenwood again showed his mastery of several instruments, at points even tinkering around with a little boom box that was hooked up to some sort of sampler or reverb to add echoey, dystopian-sounding vocal snippets to “The National Anthem" and other numbers.
ERNEST JASMIN

As you might have noticed from these pics, the set was enhanced by a brilliant light show, with LED tubes arranged all around the band to add intense reds and icy blues to several numbers. The effect was especially dramatic as the brilliant, solar bursts of orange underscored the dramatic chorus of "OK Computer" era track -- “Lucky,” my favorite track of the evening, for the record. And in a completely unrelated personnel note, producer Nigel Godrich – practically the band’s sixth member, since he’s manned the boards for most of Radiohead’s best recordings – showed up to bang some tambourine during the encores.
ERNEST JASMIN

British noise-rockers, Liars, opened the show -- a band I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around since a bunch of critics that are obviously hipper than I flipped over the outfit’s 2006 album, “Drum’s Not Dead.” No sir, I don’t get it, though front man Angus Andrew was pretty fun in a goofy Karen O kind of way – singing and mumbling with the mike halfway in his mouth at times, and adding entertainment value with absurdly dramatic stage stage moves. Occasionally, the band hit a nice groove, as on “Plaster Casts of Everything,” one of the band’s few songs that, Andrew acknowledged, fit into Seattle’s grungy image. (Well, the grungy image Seattle had a decade ago.)
ERNEST JASMIN