Thom Yorke is a great dancer. This talent doesn't come up too often in his day job fronting the transcendently dispirited quintet Radiohead, where long, simmering songs tend to cover topics like wolves at one's door, impending ice ages and God being unamused by a videotape of your life.
But at Friday night's debut of his still-unnamed solo-project/ensemble at the Echoplex, he moved like Busby Berkeley at the end of days -- jerky robot twitches, stoned head-rolls, teenage sock-hop bouncing. For a man who leads what's likely to be the last rock band considered the best and best-selling at the same time, there was a sense of a previously untapped emotion in the onstage performance: Joy. For the few hundred vigilant souls at the Echoplex who managed to sneak onto Ticketweb before it exploded Friday, the feeling was absolutely mutual.
Yorke formed the new project -- with Flea, Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco -- to play out material from Yorke's 2006 glitchy laptop-pop solo debut "The Eraser" and a few new and rare tunes. Yorke billed it as a "rehearsal" onstage, but the set was a flawless performance. Though it will break the heart of everyone in the line that stretched to Echo Park Lake outside, there was standing room aplenty next to Zack de la Rocha, Kim Gordon and, we hear, Daft Punk and Rick Rubin in there.
First, it must be said that casting Flea on bass was a devilish and particularly brilliant move for this ensemble. There might not be another rock musician with a better sense of syncopation, and his drill-bit-precise computer-funk bass lines made the songs swing in a way that Radiohead rarely gets at on record.
Opening with the title track from "The Eraser," it was instantly apparent the group was up to something entirely different. Phil Selway is a fine drummer in Radiohead, but this material veered much closer to the kind of drum-and-bass and old-rave percussion that's percolated into Radiohead's arrangements but never really stood up front. Maybe I just have this sound on the brain lately, but a lot of it moved like dubstep and what you'd find at Low End Theory. "The Clock" and "Skip Divided" were revelatory this way -- the edge-of-your-seat beats with Yorke's ever-reaching falsetto and a melodica turn by Flea added up to something uncannily pretty yet completely swaggering and kinetic.
