Radiohead

OK Computer

A small review from the greatest album of the '90s.

Suddenly the three-guitar indie-rock band of 1993-'94 were now hunched over mellotrons, tinkling on glockenspiels, sawing away at violins and rhapsodizing on electric pianos that shimmered like a sunset on a lake…The Radiohead-Nigel Godrish production blended exquisitely clear tones with hellish paradoxes of distortion and electric chaos.

Yorke's singing is superlative : the frightened falsetto whimper, the slurred moan, the guttural imprecation, the howl…i never heard a singer sung like that in a very long time.
Johnny Greenwood guitar sounds innovative ,experimental and at the same time brutal and raw; they were just impressive sounds that astonished everyone. Even Slash would later comment: "I haven't heard guitar sounds like that in God knows how long".
These themes of helpless and alienation were amplified by the album's spectral artwork, witch hinted at profound disquiet without actually identifying the terror. The key phrase on the cover said "Lost Child", but the booklet's pages offered plenty for the reader to think about: bizarre scrawls and doodles; a smiley logo from a Mexican fritos brand; random words in Esperanto; patronizing health-and-safety instructions in English and Greek…
Some commentators have attributed OK Computer's sense of dread – and indeed its title – to technophobia on Yorke's part. In reality, IMHO, Yorke seems not in the least a technophobe ( remember Kid A) – more like a technophile with ethical reservations.

I think the millenium's got a lot to do with it…it was not long ago, and we all remember that it affects everything that everybody does at the moment. And I think that a lot of this predictions on this record have come true to a certain degree. Most people were just beginning to get their first mobile phones around at the time, and have a computer at home, and the internet was taking off. There was a huge world of global communication and technology that had never been explored before. And while that was very exciting, for a lot of people it was also very scary. Some had this idea that, come 2000, all the computers were going to break and it was going to set off nuclear bombs in the power stations…

Radiohead's OK Computer influence numerous bands for sure, but the populist albums of the post OK Computer era – The Verve's Urban Hymns, Travis's Good Feeling, Stereophonics Word Gets Around, Robbie Williams's Life Thru A Lens – effectively closed the door that OK Computer's boffin-esque experience-inventiveness had open, and none of them had much to say about pre-millenium anxiety. A nation stunned by the death of Princess Di wanted songs with reassuring chord progressions, anthemic choruses to lift the spirits, and no alarms and no surprises...

Radiohead have been criticized for their gloomy prognoses of humanity's inexorable meltdown, but ten years later, OK Computer seems all the wiser for not being suckered into fashionable optimism…
Nevertheless, OK Computer had exceeded three million sales in Europe and over than two million in America. Not bad going for a piece of art that brooks no compromise and demands the listener's full attention.
Radiohead can never recreate – and nor would they ever wish to – the mood we felt in the air when "the skies darkened and the rains started falling", and OK Computer made some inexplicable sense of it all…

A magisterial pre-millenium warning siren from the last truly progressive & experimental rock band.