The choppy intertwining of redundant ideas.Ī superb album, but not the greatest of all time, as many claim. OK Computer marks another stage in Radiohead's unprecedented legacy, combining the rock of.Īn album that bakes in its own hostility, but still manages to be a variety of different e.Ī look at OK computer song by song. Through each creeping rise and fall of OK Computer, you come to realize just how much musi.Ī Chemical Reaction: The Core of OK Computer. This was in such stark contrast to much of the music from the Britpop moment as to sound like something entirely new (the honourable exception being Blur's sublime The Universal which predates Radiohead's millennialism by a good two years), There is Airbag's Ballardian tale of surviving a car crash, where technology nearly takes and then rescues life Paranoid Android's disorientated, scattershot anger towards the alienating effects of digital sound, featuring some mind-boggling guitar work from Jonny Greenwood Subterranean Homesick Alien's Miles Davis-influenced, innocent fantasy of seeing the world new and beautiful and the album's great opus, No Surprises, an unspeakably atmospheric, beautifully disillusioned update of the Beach Boys' Caroline, No, delivered with humanity and a fatalistic compassion that its authors would lose in the imperious and paradoxically technology-embracing drone of their subsequent albums. One of the album's strengths lies in Thom Yorke's lyrically Orwellian depiction of a terror-filled yet hopeful world peopled by characters who buzz like fridges. With this album, Radiohead dared to catch up with the surrounding popular culture it stands proudly alongside works by Martin Amis, Oliver Bevan, JG Ballard, David Cronenberg and other who focused on the dystopian aspects of an increasingly technology-driven world.

Coming out in a period where a gaggle of bands were sticking rigidly to a revisionist, oversimplified reading of their progenitors' music - Kula Shaker's psychedelia revivalism, Ocean Colour Scene's 'mod' revivalism, Oasis's increasingly moronic tributes to the Beatles - OK Computer stuck out like a sore thumb. One of the many reasons OK Computer stands out from its contemporaries is that it was the first rock album in almost two decades that dared to deal with themes of urban alienation and technology's effect on the human psyche.

OK album, recommended if you are into this sort of music but otherwise you may not like it. Review Summary: This album is good for people who like this sort of music but not for others

Rating of ok computer radiohead