Radiohead, Duffy cut through Lollapalozza languor, heat

Lollapalooza 2008 blanketed Chicago's Grant Park on Friday with sun-baked music fans. The sold-out crowd had a tough slog through the brutally hot day, the majority waiting for the evening's headliners, Radiohead.

Thankfully, the wait was justified for most.

England's Radiohead is one of those rare bands loved by critics and fans. They're popular enough to eschew record label support, as they did for last year's self-released "In Rainbows." Yet their music remains somewhat distant and alien, combining the ambient, keening extremes of Pink Floyd and U2 with hipster electronica. Friday's huge audience responded with reverence rather than revelry.

Vocalist Thom Yorke typically kept the band's spacier flights grounded, his elfin vocals curiously warm and alive within the haunting framework of "Reckoner." This after the band's first real spark of energy, "Jigsaw Falling into Place," delivered an upbeat, simmering groove. The band fluctuated between these modes, rewarding patience with luxuriously yearning atmospheres.

The heat was a sore spot with Villa Park's Amy Batko, who attended Lollapalooza for the first time Friday. "It's too hot," she said. "It should have been on a different weekend." Batko says she arrived early to see hard rock choir Bang Camaro, who played at 11:30 a.m. She missed the beginning of the band's set because she was waiting in line to get in. The line still stretched far down Columbus Drive by midafternoon.

A variety of energetic musicians did their best to cut through the afternoon languor. Most successful were Gogol Bordello, the New York-based "Gypsy punk" collective. Never ceasing movement, the group combined Balkan folk with boisterous rock, reggae and Latin rhythms in an exuberant celebration of America's melting pot. Although frontman Eugene Hütz, sporting a slingshot as a necklace, called their set a "study of anthropological castoffs around the world," their onstage party was anything but a boring lecture.

English post-punk quartet Bloc Party pulled a decent crowd opposite Jack Wite's Raconteurs, although Elmhurst fan Patrick Pingitore was "disappointed they didn't play a whole hour." Pingitore said that despite the heat and wait to get in, he enjoyed his second trip to the fest. "I've liked walking around and listening to different bands I don't know, which I didn't do last year."

Chicago hip-duo The Cool Kids, the city's only representatives of the day, mingled feel-good old school rhymes with direct, block-rocking beats, eliciting a strong crowd response that they won't just be an Internet sensation for long.

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