Events

[ROCK] “It’s just as hard as I thought it would be, but we’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” says Scott Molloy of Lazlo Hollyfeld. Molloy has taken time away from an open-bar celebration to chat about performing Radiohead’s In Rainbows in all its iridescent splendor this Friday, May 20 at Buffalo Iron Works. Fear not about delusions of grandeur and overblown meandering: the band is sticking to the plot. “Here’s the trick that you start to uncover as you go about learning this music… there’s such a subtle nuance to where each note is placed and the time it’s sustained, you realize it was written that way for a very particular reason,” Molloy explained. “When you mess with it, it lacks the same impact. This material is so well crafted and meticulously thought out, it demands being learned by-the-book and you discover why it was composed a certain way as you move through it.” Lazlo Hollyfeld is collectively enthused about Radiohead, including the just-released A Moon Shaped Pool, which caught Molloy off guard with its instantly-likable quality, allowing him to dispense with the normal warm-up period that quality albums often require. He says In Rainbows stands out for its organic nature, since it represented a paring down for Radiohead at the time—a return to hearing them pretty much as a live band with less studio trickery—which also makes the 2007 release the best choice for a show like Friday’s. Even still, the Lazlo-four (Molloy, Sonny Baker, Matt Felski, and Chris Gangarossa) have recruited sometimes-members Dave Calos and Chris Groves, (Bearhunter, Applenium), to help flesh out the sound, which is something they’ve done in the past when recreating work by Talking Heads. “Dave is such a phenomenal talent—he really knows how to make a guitar sing and has an incredible voice, while Chris is an electronic mastermind. They’re really the key to making us available to do this. We’ll be doing In Rainbows and then a separate catalogue of Radiohead tunes selected from Kid A and beyond. So, warning: there will be no ‘Paranoid Android.’ We’re challenging ourselves to play some tough material, which is one of the reasons why we want to do it. But we chose to limit ourselves to nothing prior to 2000 since there’s already so much diversity in what’s come out since then.” Chameleon Project opens the show.