2.5 stars (out of 4)

On a brief but revelatory 2010 tour with his other band, Atoms for Peace, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke got real, real gone. The singer with the self-serious reputation busted out dance moves that brought the somber, foreboding music on his 2006 solo release, “The Eraser,” squirming to life.

Yorke tries to work a similar transformation on a video for “Lotus Flower,” one of eight songs that make up Radiohead’s eighth studio album, “The King of Limbs” (W.A.S.T.E.), which the band released Friday on its Web site.

In the video, Yorke doesn’t so much dance as spazz out, his awkward flailing suggesting a child hearing a “Sesame Street” jam for the first time. In a bowler hat, he darts and stumbles in and out of shadows, a combination of Happy Monday’s designated dancer Bez and Charlie Chaplin. An upright-bass line threads through a grid of handclaps, syncopated drum beats and keyboard blips. Yorke’s voice floats high and delicate over the undulating rhythms, searching for open space. 

“And now I set you free/I set you free,” Yorke sings, as if willing his body loose from its inhibition. “I will sink and I will disappear/I will slip into the groove and cut me up and cut me up.”

It’s an exciting extension of the music on the Atoms for Peace tour, but this is not Radiohead’s dance album. It is an album of spaciousness and claustrophobia, possibility and inhibition; at its best it feels fidgety and unstable, at its worst downcast and a bit predictable. Like “The Eraser,” it is more intriguing for what it promises than what it actually does; imagine the band playing these songs in concert and how they will transform them. Radiohead treats the tracks like cavernous canvasses, careful not to fill in too much: percussion skitters and darts, voices reverberate in vast empty spaces, keyboards hover, bass and guitars play abstract patterns against one another, Yorke’s voice stretches delicate melodies.

    The shaggy haired singer bounced, shimmied and vibrated around the stage of the Aragon on Saturday in the first of two sold-out concerts, transforming the haunted, anxiety-drenched songs on his 2006 solo album, “The Eraser,” into pulsing, hot-blooded dance workouts with his new quintet, Atoms for Peace.

    The transformation was not unlike the one that took place in 2001 in Grant Park, when Radiohead turned the claustrophobic tunes on its “Kid A” album into expansive outdoor anthems.

    With the bassist Flea (moonlighting from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) bobbing like a blue-green-haired rubber ball next to him, Yorke embodied the bolder rhythmic approach as if to defy the dire observations in his lyrics and his reputation as a self-serious artist. Yorke doesn't get this animated at Radiohead shows, but by channeling Bez of the Happy Mondays, he brought "The Eraser" to life in a way that didn't seem possible.

    The excellent band helped his cause. Joey Waronker played skittering, slippery patterns on drums, while Mauro Refosco added layers of syncopation on various percussion nick-knacks, including a Brazilian bow. Nigel Godrich weaved glitchy computer and keyboard textures through the rhythmic web, creating a futuristic dance music that bridged techno, electro-funk and world music. The rhythms didn’t pound so much as undulate, complementing Yorke’s airy vocal melodies.