Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

Using the textured soundscapes of The Bends as a launching pad, Radiohead delivered another startlingly accomplished set of modern guitar rock with OK Computer. The anthemic guitar heroics present on Pablo Honey and even The Bends are nowhere to be heard here. Radiohead have stripped away many of the obvious elements of guitar rock, creating music that is subtle and textured, yet still has the feeling of rock & roll. Even at its most adventurous — such as the complex, multi-segmented "Paranoid Android" — the band is tight, melodic, and muscular, and Thom Yorke's voice effortlessly shifts from a sweet falsetto to vicious snarls. It's a thoroughly astonishing demonstration of musical virtuosity, and becomes even more impressive with repeated listens, which reveal subtleties like electronica rhythms, eerie keyboards, odd time signatures, and complex syncopations. Yet all of this would simply be showmanship if the songs weren't strong in themselves, and OK Computer is filled with moody masterpieces, from the shimmering "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and the sighing "Karma Police" to the gothic crawl of "Exit Music (For a Film)." OK Computer is the album that establishes Radiohead as one of the most inventive and rewarding guitar-rock bands of the '90s.

Douglas Wolk, Amazon.com

Radiohead's third album got compared to Pink Floyd a lot when it came out, and its slow drama and conceptual sweep certainly put it in that category. OK Computer, though, is a complicated and difficult record: an album about the way machines dehumanize people that's almost entirely un-electronic; an album by a British "new wave of new wave" band that rejects speed and hooks in favor of languorous texture and morose details; a sad and humanist record whose central moment is Thom Yorke crooning "We hope that you choke." Sluggish, understated, and hard to get a grip on, OK Computer takes a few listens to appreciate, but its entirety means more than any one song.

Caitlin Moran, Amazon.co.uk

Whilst one suspects some kind of pre-millennial hysteria prompted Q magazine's readers to vote OK Computer The Greatest Album Ever Made scarcely five months after its release, it certainly doesn't look stupid up there in the pantheon. Following the hot red rock attack of 1995's The Bends, OK Computer heads out into the cold deep space of prog-rock and comes back with stuff that makes mere pop earthlings like Stereophonics tremble. Whilst the eight-minute-long "Paranoid Android" comes across like "Bohemian Rhapsody" with a gun held to its head, and "Electioneering" is a little too like a kiddy-version of Blood And Chocolate-era Elvis Costello to be truly revelatory, the rest of OK Computer spans the sublime to the ridiculously sublime. Thom Yorke had been obsessed with Ennio Morricone during the recording of the album (in a haunted mansion, fact-fans), and it shows on the expansive space-dream of "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and the endlessly comforting closer "The Tourist". And if neither "No Surprises" (played on a toy guitar with Yorke and Ed O'Brien harmonising like a two-man Crowded House) nor "Lucky" (recorded in one day for the Bosnian aid album War Child--it reduced Yorke to tears the first time he heard it played back) make the hairs on your skin spit with electricity, then maybe you're with the Q reader who voted for Anita by Anita Dobson.

Colin Helms, Barnes&Noble

The creative leap Radiohead made between its first album, 1993's Pablo Honey, and its second, 1995's The Bends, was both unexpected and expansive, effectively unburdening the group from the one-hit-wonder status they'd lugged around since the success of their gimmicky debut single, "Creep." But if The Bends garnered the English quintet some much-needed artistic credibility, the astonishing emotional and compositional complexity of 1997's OK Computer catapulted the group into the realm of idolatry. Essentially a post-Orwellian meditation on the debilitating clutter of modern life and the desire to escape from it, OK Computer is art-rock at its most rewarding and contradictory -- subtly layered but startlingly bombastic, melancholic but beautifully serene, fractured and chaotic but completely sure of its own sonic ambition. With Thom Yorke's cracked yowl as its center, the album takes countless schizophrenic twists and turns -- from the multi-segmented anxiety opera "Paranoid Android" to the bleak, languorous despair of "Exit Music (for a Film)" -- all the while maintaining its sense of dark, slowly unfolding drama. Figure in waves of disorienting guitar effects, barely there rhythmic undercurrents, and eerie, ambient washes, and you've got one of the few rock masterpieces of the '90s.

OK COMPUTER, Radiohead's third album, is the bombastic follow-up to 1995's sleeper hit THE BENDS, which left critics and listeners as impressed with the band's ability as they were curious about their potential. In spite of its technological-sounding title and apocalyptic sci-fi themes, OK COMPUTER is firmly grounded in the rock verities. Waves of guitars rage beneath the haunting melodies and near-hysterical fits of singer Thom Yorke. This complex, intense swarm of guitars is held aloft by a solid, inventive rhythm section and an impressive array of piano and keyboard textures.
"Paranoid Android" is a six-minute-plus epic with alternating time signatures, wild dynamic shifts, drama and adrenaline to spare. "Let Down," with its double-tracked vocals and rhythmic throb, may give a brief glimpse back at Radiohead's past, but at no point is OK COMPUTER anything but a hurtle forward.

Megan Frampton, CMJ New Music Report, issue 528, June 30, 1997

Radiohead's debut release snuck up on American music listeners like a snake: not noticed at first, but once seen, impossible to ignore. "Creep," the band's hit single, was both catchy and difficult, an angry, self-deprecating pop song that wound its way around its listeners' ears. Radiohead's second record, The Bends, while not as popular on the radio, won many more fans, positioning the band for further success on both commercial and critical fronts. On its third release, OK Computer, Radiohead doesn't have its former anonymity: It's got to deliver the goods quickly and well. And it does. OK Computer is a powerhouse of a record, with huge pop/rock songs flanked by slower songs that pack the same ultimate punch as the fast ones. The band's songs are defined by lead singer Thom Yorke's insidious vocals and the equally spooky guitar work of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien. The songs are a unique blend of technology and old-fashioned musicianship, so that the addition of synthesizers and samples doesn't make the songs more rhythmic, but adds another dimension to the overall sound. Listening to the record, you wouldn't initially realize that there are so many computerized noises weaving through the songs, but a closer listen reveals a dense, texturally-rich presentation that relies equally on both musical approaches. It's going to be a Radiohead summer, with initial OKs going to "Climbing Up The Walls," "Paranoid Android" and "Exit Music (For A Film)."

Jesse Fahnestock, Ink Blot Magazine

You can almost pinpoint the moment, a few seconds into "Let Down," when reality hits you: Radiohead are a great band.

By that point they've cranked up the metallic gears of "Airbag," pinballed around the schizoid mini-opera "Paranoid Android" and staggered through two desperate, emotional ballads ("Subterranean Homesick Alien" and "Exit Music (From a Film)"). By the time "Let Down" slips into its beautiful descending melody, OK Computer has won another convert.

Could this be the same band that sneaked onto MTV with "one-hit wonder" tattooed all over their signature song, "Creep"? Well, no, it couldn't. The Bends, their excellent sophomore album, saw to that. But OK Computer is not so much a natural progression as a wild, blind leap of ambition.

First off the cliff are the Greenwood brothers and their guitars. It's clear from the impressionistic sketching on "Airbag" and "Climbing Up The Walls" that they've scrapped the rule book; the result is some consistently surprising, often dazzling guitar playing.

Their ambition is matched, if not surpassed, by Thom Yorke's dedication to the cause. Yes, he's still miserable, but here he mines his desperation with a keen eye and sharp tongue. "Lucky" is sad yet brutally sarcastic, while "Karma Police" is downright wisecracking. Yorke's aim is true, and OK Computer is a bullseye.

Paul Cantin, Ottawa Sun / JAM! Music Review, June 22, 1997

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but the cover of Radiohead's outstanding third album, OK Computer, perfectly foreshadows the disorienting delights held inside.

The CD sleeve is a hodge-podge of white space and borrowed images, contradictory messages and blurry photographs, crudely scrawled pictographs and desperate non-sequitur instructions.

It's an apt visual metaphor for the sounds and songs the quintet has created for an album that seems destined to make the shortlist of the year's best.

At first blush, there's a more reflective feel to the record, compared to the overdrive angst and bleak murmuring of last year's The Bends. But singer Thom Yorke continues to be a lyricist of deceptively direct power. He proves once again to be a master of relating complex emotional circumstances in the most direct, unique language.

Airbag uses the standard auto safety mechanism as a metaphor for the rock star experience. "In a jackknifed juggernaut/I am born again ... In an intastella burst I am back to save the universe," Yorke sings of fame's double-edge. But he delivers the message without resorting to poor-little rocker self-pity. Fitter Happier uses a synthesized voice to rhyme off a list of alleged contemporary ideals ("not drinking too much ... a patient better driver"), and the sense of alienation is palpable.

The theme continues with Paranoid Android, a six-minute twisted medley that shifts tone with jarring transitions and Yorke's portrayal of the ugly celebrity ego: "Why don't you remember my name? Off with his head." The misanthropic sentiment then switches targets abruptly to the nouveau riche ("squeeling (sic) gucci little piggy ... the yuppies networking/the vomit/the vomit"). It's worth noting one of the most challenging tracks on the record is the first single.

But that's appropriate, too. OK Computer (is that title the name of a cut-rate tech shop or a sigh of resignation in the face of techno overload?) is a brave move away from the shallow buzz-bin mentality toward something more substantial and ultimately more rewarding.

Taylor Parkes, Melody Maker, June 14, 1997

I've had so many arguments about millennarianism these last few years, I'll be glad when the millennium finally f***s off, even if the Third Antichrist does rain down his terror from the East, aliens come and eat us and Jesus Christ Almighty turns up on Holloway Road wearing knuckledusters and murder in his eye. You know what I mean? It's hard enough just to get through the days. But it only really struck me relatively recently just how it all works, this vague unease, this unspecified sense of pressure and awful, muggy millencholia. I was thinking about the propagation of millennial angst by the media in general and Channel 4 in particular, and I realised: like everything else, it's not "reflected" by the media, it lives in the media - a goodly part of this global angst has actually been imprinted on our subconscious by TV, the internet, by electronic communication itself - but maybe it stems in part from a dim awareness of the process itself, the creation of real fear by an external, inhuman influence. The realisation we've been invaded this deeply by strangers and machines; a hint of a future far worse than any possible clean-kill apocalypse. A perfectly good reason to feel frightened. 
See, I was thinking of that BT advert, with the little girl gazing puzzled at aeroplanes and tea-time commuters and putting on that confused child's whimper that, as far as advertising exectutives are concerned, immediately implies the eternal wisdom loose in an immature mind: "Why do people work in big offices so far from where they live?". The inference being that, once we've all abandoned the outmoded tribulations of business meetings and travelling abroad for work, handing over the effort to modems and email and video conferences and ultimately, a virtual workplace, we'll all spend a lot more time out in the fields with our families, the lead to an Irish setter in one hand, the other holding a kite. A triumph for communications: a world in which nobody ever has to meet anybody else. And I thought of "Fitter Happier" from the new Radiohead LP, an incredible piece, perhaps because of the obviousness of approach. A computerised voice intones an artless, inarticulate litany of modern-living buzz-prases ("FITTER HAPPIER MORE PRODUCTIVE COMFORTABLE GETTING ON BETTER WITH ASSOCIATE EMPLOYEE CONTEMPORARIES AT EASE EATING WELL A PATIENT BETTER DRIVER KEEP IN CONTACT WITH OLD FRIENDS ENJOY A DRINK NOW AND THEN") across the kind of tragic, piano piece more commonly heard on wartime documentaries over black and white film of smashed cities and Flanders mud. Finally, bars of white noise cut across and the music trails away, leaving the metal voice unaccompanied: "NO LONGER EMPTY AND FRANTIC LIKE A CAT TIED TO A STICK DRIVEN INTO FROZEN WINTER SHIT. THE ABILITY TO LAUGH AT EAKNESS. CALM. FITTER HEALTHIER MORE PRODUCTIVE. A PIG IN A CAGE ON ANTIBIOTICS." And I was thinking: maybe in the Nineties, tortured rock stars are a little easier to emphasise with, because the times have lent us, the audience, that requisite sense of isolation and unfocussed alienation. I was thinking about Thom Yorke, a man who gives the impression he gets paranoid watching "Wanted", not sleeping on a Sunday night for the realisation of how exposed we all are, how easy we are to find. If the unstable, quick-slow existence of pop stardom offers Thom both the free time and the necessary stress and disorientation to think in terms as absurdly anxious as "Climbing Up The Walls" ("I am the pick in the ice...we are friends till we die/Do not cry or hit the panic button/You'll get the loneliest feeling that either way you turn I'll be there"), maybe half of us though our sense of inertia and unspecified angst have an idea of what he's talking about. When the vocals dissolve into a distant storm of rabid, distorted screams, it's not the snortings and foot-stampings of a petulant ingrate, rather a snippet of that same rage that drives us into lousy self-mollification or else off the hinge. A very modern terror, an unreachable itch. On these terms, it's even possible to overlook the vague sliminess of sound of OK Computer; the way some of these arrangements are so fucking overblown it beggars belief, that horrid Nineties airlessness about the production - in context, they only serve to heighten the sense of being stranded amongst pixels. Specifically on "Airbag", a tale of death narrowly avoided, inspired by car commercials, where an awful U2-like backing track is sufficiently subverted by Thom's uneasy croon to sound positively pertinent. It sounds like a car commercial, charged with vague psychosis, as if Yorke's already been absorbed into the oppressive banality of modern living and can only scream out from the inside. If The Bends tended towards the pleasingly maudlin, OK Computer takes it all head on. Mostly, it's crimson music, as grotesque and claustrophobic as those videos of internal organs filmed by a camera in a pipe shoved up inside the body. Purely as rock, in terms of composition and performance, it's very impressive. That's not the point. It doesn't sound like a rock record, it sounds like a facsimile of unwanted feelings on wet weekday afternoons, or in the middle of the night. I can't think of any time I'd ever want to listen to it. I can imagine a time when I might feel as though I needed to listen to it. "Exit Music", which could possibly document a double suicide, builds to a climax as dense and choking as carbon monoxide. "Let Down" details the crushing of an insect and sounds like hell. "Paranoid Android", the interminable single, is the weak point - much of the rest of OK Computer is far more concise and clear, and all the more unsettling for it. It sounds like gristle, "the crackle of pig skin", steady and sickly, molten guitars and abject horror. It's unlike anything I've ever heard before, but has none of the vivacity that generally accompanies originality (even audible on The Holy Bible). It's as pained and as slow-moving as the emotions that inspired it. I can't work out whether I like it, although I think I like it very much indeed. I definitely know it isn't good for me, and I'm certain it says more about my life than I'd like. In one way or another, Radiohead have excelled themselves. They've seen the future. It is murder. Who's going to join them there?

Never ones to take the easy route to work, Oxford 's finest have crafted their new album somewhere at the outer limits. Freaking out in their moonage daydream, Nick Kent. Because it 's so damnably hard to pigeonhole effectively, you 'll probably be seeing the new Radiohead album described in all manners of half-hearted ways over the next few weeks. Some will glance at titles like Paranoid Android, hear what sounds like a mellotron (but probably isn 't) swelling up on two or three tracks, note the strange song structures throughout, and lazily conclude that the Oxford quintet have decided to come over all prog rock, like some late 90 's manifestation of early King Crimson. Others will hear the spacey mix and all those freaky guitars buzzing around and immediately think, This must be their "psychedelic" record. But I can only imagine someone listening to it on hallucinogenic drugs having a pretty grim time. It 's not punk rock, lad-rock, Britpop or grunge, either, and you can forget about "easy listening" right now. There 's little that 's "easy" about this record, little sugar coating on the pill this time, no temporary oasis of perfect pop escapism and calm to bury yourself in while you try to come to terms with the trickier stuff. Thom Yorke may be big mates with the lofty likes of Michael Stipe these days, and he may accept the odd prestigious music industry award standing alongside Brian Eno, but on this record, fame and success haven 't removed the considerable chip still weighing on his shoulders. From the very outset of their career, Yorke and Radiohead have always taken a pride in their perceived status as rock 's rank outsiders. They 've never belonged within any easy community-minded groups, while their best known song, Creep, is as close to a definitive anthem for outsiders as has been written in the last 20 years. Now they 've been allowed to produce themselves - and it can 't be overemphasised: the fact is, they 've done a great job - Yorke and co have finally created their own little sonic galaxy, part enchanted planet, part outsiders club, with Yorke the ultimate anti-glamour rock star sneering and seething - often with tongue not altogether out of cheek, while his co-workers content themselves by performing some of the most ingeniously arranged guitar-bass-drums-with-a-bit-of-synth based music ever made. Airbag has a stately but slightly tortured "lost-in-space" feel, a bit like early Pink Floyd but more melancholy. The mix is alive with flanged guitars weaving among each other like snakes: "I am born again", sings Yorke, but the abjectly mournful tone his voice elicits would lead one to feel this could be a curse and not a blessing. Next up, Paranoid Android is the frankly audacious choice for first single, so you 've doubtless already been confronted with its deeply eccentric "plaintive acoustic ditty to paranoid screaming electric noise and back" navigations, topped off with a sequence that sounds not unlike a bunch of pissed monks chanting in an abbey somewhere in the depths of Czechoslovakia. Subterranean Homesick Alien counters Android 's giddy changes by being a slow, beautifully languid piece led by a jazzy electric piano that features one of Yorke 's most beguiling vocals to date as he sends out a touching message of comfort and sympathy to alien life-forms trapped discontentedly on this planet. It helps to know that Exit Music was written for the close of Hollywood 's recent grunge re-styling of Romeo And Juliet. Lyrically, all hell is about to break loose, the song 's heroine is having trouble with her breathing yet the music moves at such an eerily calm pace it feels as if everyone - singer and musicians - are on the verge of losing consciousness. Let Down is the album 's one potential anthem-rocker, full of luscious chiming guitars and a haunting melody that could easily charm its way into the higher regions of the international singles chart. Then things swiftly turn weird and ugly again with the arrival of the vindictive Karma Police. "That 's what you get/ when you mess with us", Yorke snarls/ sings by way of a chorus, but the slightly turgid rhythm makes you wonder whether he ;s being malicious or just being ironic. Echoes of White Album John Lennon are well evident here, specifically the somnambulist lurch of I 'm So Tired and certain of the chord changes of Sexy Sadie. Electioneering is the full-tilt anarchic rock bash-up and sounds like a splendidly warped deconstruction of dear old Alice Cooper 's School 's Out. On the edgy Climbing Up The Walls, Yorke takes a detour onto Tricky 's turf with a claustrophobic trip-hop vibe and distorted vocals before bringing in the rest of the group to return the sonic thrust closer to the guitar-based heart of Radioheadland. No Surprises is the other potential hit here: an enchanting guitar ballad - somewhat in the vein of the Velvets' Sunday Morning - this could be Radiohead 's very own Losing My Religion. Lucky you probably heard on the H. E. L. P. benefit album a couple of years ago. As haunting as ever, it fits in here perfectly as an extended melancholy farewell alongside The Tourist, the remarkable last track. Deep slow, deeply soulful - just beautiful. What does it all add up to? Certainly a record to which the adjectives "dour" and "dense" seem particularly appropriate when hearing it the first few times. Because there 's so much going on here it can get a bit hairy in the beginning. It opens up quickly enough, though, and once you 've been hooked, it never stops growing on you. Better than The Bends? Probably. Record of the year? Conceivably. Others may end up selling more, but in 20 years time I 'm betting OK Computer will be seen as the key record of 1997, the one to take rock forward instead of artfully revamping images and song-structures from an earlier era.

James Oldham, New Musical Express

"... Oxfordshire 1996, and Radiohead finally begin to record the follow-up to 'The Bends'. Thom Yorke's brain is accelerating. The aforementioned view amplified by the conditions in which he's working. Recording at night, he goes to bed at dawn and wakes at ten to continue the lyrics. His state of mind is sleepless and fractured. When 'OK Computer' is finished, Yorke describes the 12 completed songs as "Polaroids in my head", a succession of snapshots that form a larger whole. Away from distractions and shrouded in secrecy, Radiohead have created an album motivated and unified by one overriding theme: three years away from the millennium, Yorke wants to leave the planet and escape from the routine and clutter of life. 
Not that Radiohead have chosen to follow a 1.5 million-selling record with a concept album; at least, not consciously. It's just that virtually every track on 'OK Computer' is driven by a feeling of impotence with the world around it. And it's that realisation which makes 'OK Computer' both age-defining and one of the most startling albums ever made. Here are 12 tracks crammed with towering lyrical ambition and musical exploration; that refuse to retread the successful formulas of before and instead opt for innovation and surprise; and that vividly articulate both the dreams and anxieties of one man without ever considering sacrifice or surrender. What makes it so important is its context. After all, 'The Bends' elevated Radiohead into the sphere of stadiums. When they eventually tour Britain later this year, you will be watching them in the largest venues in the country. 
The transition, however, has been made with the soul of the band kept intact. While Thom was dreaming daily of planetary escape, the rest of the group were fashioning alien sounds from earthly instruments. In much the same way as Spiritualized's Jason Pierce became obsessed with new sound when recording 'Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space', so it seems did Radiohead. Of course, the first single - 'Paranoid Android' - was designed to prepare you for that: six minutes of disconcerting sound and lyrical distress, half of which is dominated by freakish guitar spasms and jolting time changes, half by neo-classical choirs and calming acoustics. And certainly one of the most bizarre songs ever to find its way into the British Top Five. Still, as far as Radiohead are concerned, that's just the beginning... 
The album itself opens with the slashed riffs and sucking electronics of 'Airbag', a song that at once sets the scene for all that's to follow. Yorke's ambivalence towards modern technology (that's also present in the album title) and supernatural insistence that he's "back to save the universe" are both made immediately apparent. Any hope that such a feat might actually be possible, however, is quickly extinguished by the realities of the rest of side one. Not that the album immediately descends into hopelessness and morbid introspection because, while avenues of earthly escape are explored and ultimately rejected, there remains throughout a tangible sense of purpose and uplifting sentiment. Once you've negotiated the real dissatisfaction of 'Paranoid Android' (a possible hymn to the vagaries of music journalism: "When I am king you will be first against the wall/With your opinions which are of no consequence at all"), what unfolds is a curiously positive experience. 
The lyrics of 'Subterranean Homesick Alien' might crave abduction from this planet and a chance to see the world from outer space ("Take me on board.../Show me the world as I'd love to see it") and 'Let Down' might recount the feeling of being "crushed like a beetle" under "motorways and tramlines", but at no point does this feel dispiriting or self-pitying. As the world speeds by ever faster, Radiohead have attempted to retreat to calmer climes to voice their concern. 'Subterranean Homesick Alien', 'Exit Music' and 'Let Down' are all apparently peaceful: guitars materialise then fade, blissful hidden melodies drift by unnoticed, and previously still songs are suddenly given momentum by a change of wind or a movement of the tide. Listen closer, however, and you will just about be able to distinguish the sounds of daily existence: of playground babbling and overloaded electrics, of surface noise and indistinguishable drones. 
After the fading noise of 'Karma Police', side two opens with a spate of ill-natured cacophony and dehumanised cynicism. 'Fitter Happier' sees Yorke wiring himself up to a synthesized voice machine and delivering a series of increasingly curious lifestyle slogans, while 'Electioneering' buries his rage at the power of multinationals under an avalanche of uncomfortable guitar noise. It's the last (and perhaps only) moment of fight, and it's from here that 'OK Computer' soars towards its climax. The claustrophobia of 'Climbing Up The Walls' is rapidly replaced by a trio of songs that equal - if not surpass - 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)''s beatific conclusion to 'The Bends'. Here the band truly dazzle. 'No Surprises' (billed as the band's attempt to rewrite 'What A Wonderful World') marries the resignation of Yorke's lyrics ("A job that slowly kills you/Bruises that won't heal... I'll take a quiet life") to a spacious wall of melancholy and bright xylophone chimes, while 'Lucky' - previously released on the 'War Child' compilation - brings the conclusion nearer with a continuous surge of Pink Floyd-esque slow-motion guitars. 
The album ends with the sound of Thom Yorke's brain decelerating. Buried within 'The Tourist''s monastic chanting and stately guitars, you can just about make out his voice (as grief-ridden and emotive as ever) trying to make sense of what's happening to him: "Where the hell am I going?/At 1,000ft per second/Hey man slow down/Idiot slow down". It's the final, futile attempt to alter the progress of his - or indeed anyone else's - life and it's a perfect finale. Such stoicism renders 'OK Computer' a spectacular success: a true articulation of the anxiety of late-20th century man backed with music not only of extraordinary grace and melody, but also of experimental clarity and vision. Truly, this is one of the greatest albums of living memory - and the one that distances Radiohead from their peers by an interstellar mile.(10/10)"

Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork Media

Thru space at 1.2 light years per hour, Radiohead's third piece of incredible work, OK Computer, is not only their best yet, but one the year's greatest releases. 
The record is brimming with genuine emotion, beautiful and complex imagery and music, and lyrics that are at once passive and fire-breathing. OK Computer is like tossing David Bowie, old U2, Spacehog and lots of Pink Floyd into a blender and pushing the 'kill' button.
Thom Yorke's fragile vocals backed by the intricate guitar duels of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, Phil Selway's intense, rhythmic pounding and the subtle but effective bass guitar of Colin Greenwood sends an energetic flare clean through your speakers, hurtling into the room around you and charging the air with static electricity. When Yorke sings, "In an interstellar burst / I am back to save the universe," you believe him. 
OK Computer is the first album to intellegently express vehement hatred toward the corporate world's replacement of human emotion and personality with robotic behavior in their attempt to be "more professional." Yorke's disgust with self- help programs and "successful" businessmen is the focus, and if you're a person with any integrity whatsoever that's set foot in a Class A office building, you can probably relate.
Radiohead only seem to get better as time progresses, but Thom Yorke's expressed some doubt as to whether or not they can ever top this record. If they can, they'll have established themselves as one of the most outstanding rock bands the '90s had to offer. If not, they still came out of the deal with one album of unadulterated genius. Time will tell.

David Cavanagh, Q Magazine, October 2000

With their 1.5 million-selling 1995 album The Bends, Radiohead executed something of a perfect Yin and Yang: a great white hope and a big black cloud.
Thematically, a cold look at a worn-down, scrofulous interior - Thom Yorke's lyric sheet did not so much scan as fester - it was one of the great "tension" records of recent years. It was streets ahead of the more fundamental volleys of angst to be found elsewhere in guitar rock that year and, indeed, on Radiohead's own perfunctory 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey. A new song, a gripping plea for rescue entitled Lucky - released in September, 1995 on the War Child compilation album Help - gave a tantalising indication of what their third album might contain.
But now it transpires that Radiohead are even better than anybody imagined. The Bends was merely stage two in a long process of preparation for the overwhelming music of OK Computer. Radiohead are known as a dynamic and neurotic three-guitar band, but the majority of OK Computer's 12 songs (one of which is Lucky) takes place in a queer old landscape: unfamiliar and ominous, but also beautiful and unspoiled. They produced this album themselves (in their Oxfordshire studio), constructing an eerie sound-world that is both purpose-built - a five-piece rock band has rarely been better recorded - and oddly evocative of a 1984 lyric by the American group Let's Active that talked of "moonstruck eyes and grey scales".
It's not always easy to determine which instrument makes which noise. The melodies are unorthodox and tangential: there are no Justs, Creeps or Nice Dreams. It's a huge, mysterious album for the head and soul. To hear one of these songs alone is to catch one's breath: it's an unknown Radiohead. To hear the whole album is to have one's milieu well and truly up-ended and one's imagination repeatedly caught off guard by Radiohead's expanded ammo-haul of treated guitars, Mellotrons (played by the increasingly dazzling Jonny Greenwood), electric pianos (ditto) and unforeseen space effects.
A lot of prog rock fans will get off on the album's more planetarium-compatible noises (to say nothing of Greenwood's King Crimson-style guitar chords on the opening track, Airbag). That said, OK Computer is not a goblin zone. In his often extraordinary lyrics, Yorke glares as cynically and as disgustedly at life as he did on The Bends. But look at how he's writing now: "Regular exercise at the gym three days a week . . . Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries . . . Fitter, healthier and more productive/A pig in a cage on antibiotics" (Fitter, Happier). Yorke is on top form. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way," Pink Floyd told us in 1973. Twenty-four years later, Yorke out-writes Roger Waters with heavy sarcasm (and to a better tune, incidentally): "I'll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide and no alarms and no surprises, please" (No Surprises).
Whereas Dark Side Of The Moon was about madness, meadows and muddling along, OK Computer - along with The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness the present-day rock fan's closest equivalent to a '70s behemoth LP - evokes the sensation of the frequent flyer who has suddenly noticed he's travelling faster than his aircraft.
"Sometimes I get overcharged," reflects OK Computer's The Tourist. "That's when you see sparks/They ask me where I'm going at a thousand feet per second/Hey man, slow down, slow down..." As for the actual Earth, lyric after anguished lyric declares it an unfit place to live on, and condemns Yorke himself as not fit to walk it - so where does that leave him? The answer ultimately arrives on Subterranean Homesick Alien. Yorke, driving along a country lane at night, longs to be carried off by a spaceship. Nice planet. You can have it.
Small wonder much of OK Computer sounds not-quite-of-this-world. Indeed, the first three tracks (of a five-song, continuous, 25-minute suite that's as brilliant as any music of the last decade) all mention aliens or interstellar activity in some capacity. "I'm back to save the universe," Yorke sings on Airbag, over a deeply sinister soundtrack of Mellotron, cross-purposes guitars (J. Greenwood, Yorke and Ed O'Brien), reggae-style bass (Colin Greenwood) and hissing, spitting drums (Phil Selway). If Airbag is merely fascinating, Paranoid Android is simply the song of the year.
The first single, it's six-and-a-half minutes long and it comes in three sections. One of these even has its own sub-section. There's a terrific, jazzy 7/8 part with electric piano and deep-grooving bass; there's a hefty dose of blistering rock (with two guitar solos); and there's a truly awesome vocal harmony sequence reminiscent of a load of monks chanting a particularly intense extract from David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. Although only one song on OK Computer is what you'd call fast - Electioneering, coincidentally the worst track - it's got to be said that Subterranean Homesick Alien, Exit Music (For A Film) and Let Down are unusually slow and thoughtful.
Subterranean Homesick Alien has wonderful, tingling, golden guitars and Riders On The Storm-style electric piano. Let Down begins like a delicately chiming appendix to The Joshua Tree, but then crazy synthesizers start to fly in from all directions, like a laser show. And as Let Down's guitar arpeggios drip-drip-drip into the brain, Yorke - one of very few singers whose voice can appear to convey genuine grief (as opposed to pain) and despair (as opposed to frustration) - delivers a remarkable vocal: falsetto, glorious harmonies, total and utter desolation. His voice has the terrible shiver of a toddler who can't for the life of him stop crying.
Just before Let Down comes a gem of a song called Exit Music (For A Film). It concerns two young lovers leaving home and going on the run. Being a Yorke composition, it's not exactly Moonlighting by Leo Sayer. Jonny Greenwood's Mellotron produces an unearthly choir of basses and sopranos as one of the runaways implores the other, "Breathe, keep breathing, I can't do this alone." Then, during a murderous surge of drums and fuzz bass, the picture goes fuzzy. The fog clears just in time to hear Yorke moan the last, startling line: "We hope that you choke."
The superb Karma Police, written about a party full of scary people, is what might have resulted musically had The Bogus Man-period Roxy Music ever tried to play Sexy Sadie by The Beatles. Even weirder is Fitter, Happier. An aural nightmare with no precedent in Radiohead's work, it's a poem of doom, centred in the workplace and recited by a pre-programmed Apple Mac that sounds like Stephen Hawking's electronic voice. The breakneck (and somehow unsatisfying) Electioneering kicks up a royal fuss, before collapsing into the uneasy trip-hop of Climbing Up The Walls.
It now seems as though OK Computer's second half will comprise nothing but menace and cacophony. Suddenly, however, there's a respite from this two-song burst of chaos. In fact, the final three-song sequence has more control, more room to breathe (and arguably more beauty) than any other part of the record. Each of these three songs is the match of Street Spirit (Fade Out) on The Bends. No Surprises is Radiohead's prettiest moment to date, using dulcimer and Christmassy synth textures to decorate Ed O'Brien's exquisite guitar refrain.
A lesser band would have grafted Yorke's withering lyric onto a ready-made anthem of barely adequate string-bending pique. Radiohead themselves would probably have done it on Pablo Honey. Not for the first time, and not for the last, on OK Computer they make even Yorke's most feverish couplets lift sweetly off the page. The Tourist, which follows the still-spooky-and-marvellous Lucky to conclude the album, is an unexpectedly bluesy waltz. It's not easy to play a waltz with anxiety, let alone the panic felt by Yorke's hyperventilating traveller, but they do. As it reaches its final bars, the three guitars fall out, leaving just Phil Selway's brushed cymbals, a couple of plucks of Colin Greenwood's bass and - finally - the "ding" of a tiny bell. And that is that.
A landmark on every latitude. Not the least achievement of OK Computer is that a major weirdo-psychological English guitar band can induce gasps of admiration, stunned silence and more than a few lumps in the throat. It's an emotionally draining, epic experience. Now Radiohead can definitely be ranked high among the world's greatest bands.

David Fricke, Rolling Stone, issue 776/777

Radiohead's third album is one of the best rock records of the year in large part because it is the most inscrutable. "OK Computer" vigorously defies fast analysis, flip judgment and easy interpretation. Singer Thom Yorke doesn't pretend to be likable about it, either. "Ambition makes you look very ugly," he sneers amid the "Bohemian Rhapsody"-style seizures of "Paranoid Android," a slur that works both ways if you have major objections to arty sonic clutter and prog-rock pretensions. But there is nothing linear about cracking up. "OK Computer," ostensibly a concept LP about a zombie world of hard law and infernal software, is a song cycle about serial fear and suffocating routine, laid out in mad leaps of melody, tempo and pathos that slowly accrue their queer beauty: the bleak, R.E.M.-ish clatter of "Electioneering," the languid dive of Yorke's croon in the melted-Beatles carol "Lucky." Radiohead try too hard to be nonconformist -- as if they're embarrassed to just be pop -- but ambition hardly makes them ogres. It makes them special.

© Frank Steven Groen