FINE TUNING.(Radiohead)(Concert review)

Radiohead doesn't sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years--even though the spacious, colorfully ambient music that the group has been making lately is unlike the traditional guitar rock it debuted with. Last year, Spin voted Radiohead's 1997 album, "OK Computer," the No. 1 album of the past twenty years, and this month readers of NME, the influential British weekly, voted it the fourth-best album of all time, behind Oasis's "Definitely Maybe" and two Beatles albums. "OK Computer" is this generation's "Dark Side of the Moon"--complex and catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album every day. I seem to know about a hundred of these fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn't seen much point in doing so.

The lead singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, has essentially three singing styles: a tired snarl, a reedy drone, and a light falsetto. His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan. On early Radiohead albums, Yorke's lyrics were sombre expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work. After that, his lyrics became shorter and more oblique, often ending in sentence fragments that were repeated again and again, as if such persistence would give the words greater meaning. ("I will eat you alive," he groans fifteen times in "Where I End and You Begin," from 2003.) While Yorke sings, the band makes a wide, soupy sound that seems both a product of and an invitation to stoned passivity.

Yet several of the band's songs got lodged in my head, and after seeing Radiohead perform three times in the past two weeks and listening repeatedly to its recordings--including Yorke's plangent, largely electronic new solo album, "The Eraser"--I've discovered that with each successive record the fog around the music dissipates a little and Radiohead's luminous teamwork comes more clearly into view.

I still don't like Yorke's lyrics, and I wish that the melancholy that Radiohead favors were not the status quo for so many rock bands. But then the group, which consists of four men in addition to Yorke, is not, strictly speaking, much of a rock band: catharsis, speed, and violence are generally absent from its work. Radiohead's gift is in creating compositions thick with intricate harmonies. At a performance in Boston earlier this month, the melody of "Fake Plastic Trees," from the 1995 album, "The Bends," sounded like the second theme of a Schubert string quartet: Yorke's voice mimicked the timbre and varied dynamics of a violinist bowing. While deforming the words, he revealed the melody's elegance, which I couldn't hear before I saw him sing it. Yorke, as his early sponsor Michael Stipe once did, plays his voice the way his bandmates play their instruments, and he has impressively consistent pitch. Radiohead sounds like an instrumental band that happens to have a singer.

In Boston, the stage was decorated with ten rhomboid-shaped screens, which hung behind the musicians. At first, the screens were covered with glowing green dots. Later, they displayed closeup video images of the band members, or parts of them--the drummer Phil Selway's hands, Yorke's head from below, the neck of Colin Greenwood's bass guitar. Live, the band is as fluid and sparkly as it can be arid and mopey on recordings. Yorke does much more than sing. By the fifth song, he had already played guitar, keyboards, and a pared-down drum set. For the airy, gorgeous "Morning Bell," from "Kid A" (2000), he was in his falsetto mode, singing brightly and playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano, while Selway locked into a clipped pattern and ...