Radiohead at Blossom Music Center

Radiohead at Blossom Music Center

For this Detroiter, my second road trip to see Radiohead at a sold-out (and beautiful) Blossom Music Center (just outside of Cleveland) was the only way to experience the genre-bending quintet from the other side of the pond. Just days after headlining Lollapalooza’s Friday night in Chicago, vocalist Thom Yorke, Super-man musician Jonny Greenwood and the rest of the band-mates delivered another surreal sonic journey. Most of the two-hour-long concert featured tracks post “Kid A” with a healthy dose of the tunes coming straight from Radiohead’s latest, 2007’s brilliant “In Rainbows.” While the band worked their way through “Pyramid Song,” “National Anthem” and “Idioteque” under a series of metallic-looking rods hanging from the rafters, a dazzling light show bounced beaming flashes across the sky adding another dimension to the hypnotizing show. Yorke’s haunting voice echoed with isolated tension as "How to Disappear Completely” closed the proper set. But two encores constructed of eight songs were still in store, including the epic “Paranoid Android” in which Greenwood’s gyrating genius-guitar attack blasted fans into a feverish frenzy before Radiohead shut it all down with the apropos “Everything in its Right Place.”