Bonnaroo: Radiohead's Festival Evolution

The last time Radiohead played at Bonnaroo, in 2006, it seemed to metamorphose on the spot: from a cerebral, futuristic, anxiety-driven band playing its arcane songs to earnest theater audiences to a cerebral, futuristic band that could make tens of thousands of people dance like crazy. Friday night at Bonnaroo was the follow-through: Radiohead the rhythm band, hitting groove after groove and riding them to darkly kinetic places.

Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn.

Behind the band a wall of lights, made from recycled water bottles, flickered with abstract geometry: dots, lines and waves that silhouetted the musicians in cybernetic space. Above them a dozen LED screens were suspended, like computer monitors, showing closeups of the band members and repositioning themselves from song to song, lifting away or closing in.

But it was the music itself that made the best patterns: drumbeats and tangles of guitars, live and looped, bending funk into odd meters or twisting and untwisting, starting out transparent before some massive distorted keyboard texture plunged the whole assembly into ominous shadows. The rhythmic sinew of each song was exposed and vital, whether the music was moving through Beatles-like harmonies or bearing down on a handful of repeating chords. There were new songs, suggesting new paranoias: the percussive “Identikit” — “I see you messing me around, I don’t want to know,” Thom Yorke sang — and “Supercollider,” which set particle-physics images over a warped carnival beat. Between songs, Mr. Yorke was in a flinty, puckish mood, trying on accents and joking about festivalgoers taking acid and sleeping face down in the mud: bleak but jovial, Radiohead in festival mode.