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Archive for the ‘Computer’ tag

Review by N. Gower-Jones for OK Computer
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A friend of mine once said that Radiohead were the kind of band who it was easy to admire, and yet difficult to like. I always agreed, preferring the accessibility of bands like Oasis and The Stereophonics to the intensive coolie labour it could sometimes take to listen to Radiohead. Then, last summer, I went to see Radiohead play at Victoria Park in London. And I saw the light. This album can ask a lot of the listener, but if you can really give into the music and just let it carry you off, you can become so consumed by these songs that you find yourself suddenly opening your eyes at the end of a track, blinking in surprise at the fact that you are actually back in the real world. They tear your soul open, and force you to confront those feelings for which you probably don’t even have a name. Despair perhaps, numbness perhaps, but above all, the way it can sometimes feel just to be a human in the 20th Century.It’s hard to pick a stand out track (even the pretty much tune free “Fitter, Happier” makes for compelling listening), but “Exit Music (for a film)” is one of the most touching, fragile and beautiful songs you will ever hear. When you consider Thom Yorke wrote it as a soundtrack to the end of Romeo and Juliet, the lyrics become even more intense; “Today, we escape, we escape”. “Don’t lose your nerve. I can’t do this – alone”.If you have ever felt alone, disenfranchised, pointless or depressed, this record will connect with you in a way you may have never thought possible. And that contact will make you feel better. Less alone. It makes you feel like there are other people out there who feel like this. It’s a record which takes you on a journey through the darker parts of the soul. A record about how it feels to be human.Oh, and it’s very, very good (did I mention that?).

Review by R. Davies for OK Computer
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Whenever I’m asked what my favourite album ever made is, after much sighing and chin stroking, I almost inevitably end up at Radiohead’s magnificent third album. Perhaps it’s because it’s the only one of the candidates to have been released during my lifetime, I don’t know. But there you are – it’s the greatest album ever made!

Love’s Forever Changes is certainly a candidate for the above question, and while it may seem bizarre at first, I think a number of parallel can be drawn between the two.

FC came at the end of the summer of love, and was the first album to hint at the darkness that lay ahead and the unwelcome realities the movement was blind to. OKC arrived at the height of Britpop, and while the Gallagher boys were in No. 10 with the Blairs, Radiohead were also hinting at something darker, the alienation, cultural sterility and disenfranchising of the soul being felt in a digital age.

OKC can at times be cold and sterile, but it is permeated with a resonating beauty throughout. It is perfectly of a time, and yet timeless.

The songs, as you’d expect are superb, but as with all great albums the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The only point where OKC loses something is when Radiohead move from the personal to the political on Electioneering. Maybe it’s there to remind people what middle-of-the-road sounds like? It’s more than remedied by Climbing Up The Walls which follows. A dark, brooding claustrophobic monster of a sound, it’s the entrance music I would have I was a boxer!

From the riff of Airbag and the multi-faceted genius of Paranoid Android, through the atmosphere of Exit Music, incredible musicality of Let down and the singalong anthem of Karma Police to the melancholy but uplifting No Surprises, the soaring, magnificent Lucky to the epic closer The Tourist, Radiohead do not put a foot wrong.

Radiohead had just spent all the money from the bends on the kit needed to self-produce an album in Jane Seymour’s mantion. They had creative carte blanch and this was their chance to go stratospheric. Boy did they take it.

Parlophone said it was commercial suicide. That seemed wrong at the time and seems even more so 12 years on. The success of this album gives me faith in the Great British public!

Review by J. Hood for OK Computer
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With Radiohead’s two previous efforts (Pablo Honey and The Bends), they carved themselves a comfortable place in modern ‘alt’ rock. They were moderately popular, got themselves very posotive reviews, and wrote some classic alt anthems which still stand up today. They were basically britain’s answer to america’s grunge, with obvious influence from bands like Pixies and REM. Then along came OK Computer, and radiohead were never quite the same again. With the new album came a new concept, new sounds, a new range of instrumentation and experementation. The band unleashed a sprawling, a less accesible, but tantalising thrilling new album, which nobody was expecting. The album focuses on modern technology, and it’s affect upon modern life. It condemns the ways in which the late 20th century played itself out, the over-relying on technology, the de-huminisation and computerisation of the new, cold world. It’s a pre-millennial, paranoid and threatning world, where it’s either succumb to the power of technology or die.

The album digs at this, and at the lives of the soul-sucked people who inhabit this modern wasteland, the broken and the lost, the paranoid and the insane, the deluded and the doomed. It condemns the lives of the people in the big, safe houses, who succumb to routine and the technology which turns them, effectively, computers themselves. But this album’s ideology and meanings isn’t the only thing that makes it so important: so does the music itself.

The album ranges from the more radio friendly tunes (‘no surprises’) which juxtapose barbed, desperate lyrics with beautiful gentle melodies, to the more left field, bizzare tracks (‘fitter, happier’), which Radiohead delved deeper into in later records. These more left field tracks use clicks, whirrs, buzzes electronic backgrounds, to create this sometimes unsettling atmosphere. for example, ‘fitter happier’ is a 2-minute piece, with an automated voice (Thom Yorke used mac-speak for this) reading out the life of one of the many people that the album digs at, as the orchestra behind it swells as the song builds. It’s simple, yes, but also one of the most shattering and beautiful things i’ve heard in recent years. Then the album offers up the modern greats, mainly ‘Paranoid Android’, what I consider to be one of the best songs of the decade. It’s a 6 minutes fluxating, swirling mini-epic, much like Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in it’s change of pace and distinct sections. It starts slow, twisted, odd, and yes, paranoid. But chimes in soon with one of the most deliciously snarling guitar riffs, giving the song instant power and newfound bitterness anger. The song is almost like a microcosm for the entire album itself, it represents everything the album is trying to say. y’know that feeling you get when you hear a song you know is special for the first time, like the opening to Bob Dylan’s classic ‘like a rolling stone’, or The doors’ ‘The end’. that’s the feeling you get after hearing android, like you need to sit down take a breather. And this is only three songs in. Soon we have the achingly beautiful ‘exit music’, which is basic but simply wonderful. There is no filler material, no wasted second, no moment that you won’t want to replay again and again. It’s a unique and thrilling ride, that both ugly and beautiful, simaltaneously. This may not be everyone’s album, I mean, some may find it too left-field, they may demand the big guitar anthems. Or some people simply don’t get it. It’s hard to choose my favourite disc from Radiohead’s 7 near perfect albums, but for scope, ambition and overall magnificence, it’s hard to deny OK computer is their best, and not only their best, but one of the best albums of the 20th century. which i’m sure you’re sick of hearing by now.

Rating: (out of 261 reviews)