Albums by this artist

A glowing, multi-colored collection of songs frozen inside a technological fresco, OK Computer is a tribute to the tortured humans who created it as well as a blessing to the fans who play it relentlessly. The album is Radiohead's most ambitious work as well as the decade's most perplexing and compelling artistic statement.

Working inside a remote 14th-Century mansion in the countryside of England, these five men became slaves to their songs as they drafted a perfect rock-and-roll symphony for the turn of the Millennium. Who would have ever imagined the band capable of writing a simple pop hit like "Creep," or a mediocre album like Pablo Honey, could mature enough in four years to become capable of formulating -- let alone recording -- an album this amazing. It only begins to make sense when one takes into account The Bends, on which the group almost renders its first album moot.

But even when one considers The Bends, a pop masterpiece in its own right, OK Computer is still awe-inspiring. Like Robert Johnson stepping into the woods to learn guitar from the devil, or the Beatles stepping into Abbey Road to learn songwriting from each other, the members of Radiohead holed themselves in a haunted estate to collaborate with supernatural forces and inevitably work magic.

The album's new-age compositions sound intricately crafted, with myriad different parts clicking together to create and fuel this incredible music machine. With the assistance of producer Nigel Godrich, Radiohead force you into to their dreamy melancholia from note one and proceed to hypnotize you with the album's swirling, complex and hard-rocking first half.

The first three songs beam you up into the band's flying saucer to take you on a psychological space journey. Guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien produce climbing, sliding melodies as bright sonic supernovas cruise past. Slowly, the ride sets you into a cloudy trance with the rhythm section rapping the beat of your nervous heart. By the second track, "Paranoid Android," the band members seem like wide-eyed aliens trying to comfort you with their bizarre impressions of Earth. But their jaded interpretations of human existence scare you as often as they put you at ease.

The band then decides to drive you through a string of songs centered on themes of genuine love and tragic loss. "Exit Music (For A Film)" and "Let Down" are tied together perfectly. Working as one, the pair moves you in a way you'd been only affected by tragic literary classics such as Shakespeare's "Macbeth" or Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

The emotionally exhausting close to "Exit Music," which was actually used at the end of a modern film-adaptation of "Romeo And Juliet," crushes your will to live just before the gently flowing "Let Down" shows how you can be "crushed like a bug" and still carry on with life. After a lovely instrumental lull in the song's middle third, the band pulls the floor out from beneath you, while singer Thom Yorke oddly assures, "You will know where you are." Luckily, they close the side with the unnaturally catchy "Karma Police," the album's hit single, if you want to limit it to that.

If Radiohead only managed to playfully hypnotize you on the record's first side, the band calculates a full-throttle mind fuck during its second half. First, they put you on edge with the intense "fitter, happier," where a computer voice mocks you and your pitiful daily existence. Then they lash out at your eardrums with the whistling train crash that is "Electioneering." Finally, and most terrifyingly, they take complete control of you, like a demon taking possession of a soul, with "Climbing Up The Walls."

"I am the key to the lock in your house," Yorke explains. His sinister snarl grows louder as the backing music tunnels its way toward your brain, slithering through your aural passages like a snake. Before long, the tune's ending swallows your gray matter whole as the singer reminds you this is not a nightmare. He will still be climbing inside of your skull when you wake up the next morning and turn your alarm off.

Somehow, though, you end up sympathizing with this mad terrorist and his cronies for the remainder of the album. It isn't terribly hard to feel pity for your captors only because they have held you close, sharing their most intimate fears throughout the musical journey. Yorke reveals his twisted real-life phobias throughout the album, from opener "Airbag," where we meet him just after he's survived a car accident, to "Lucky," where he is being pulled from a plane crash.

On the final song, we feel him heading toward a third and more traumatic collision, perhaps his own death. "The Tourist" casts him as the captive in your control. You're moving at a 1000 feet per second, while he desperately pleads beside you to "slow down." Before you realize what's happening, the album collapses in its climactic finish, signified by the sounding of a chime.

It's hard to draw a definitive moral out of this digital fable. Perhaps it's about the collision between humanity and the mechanical world -- the clash between natural ambition and modern society's constraints. Maybe it's about Thom Yorke's tortured childhood and the resulting paranoia he seems to shoulder at all times. Maybe it's about nothing specific at all, but instead a vague representation of life at the turn of the century.

More likely, where a listener's search for this album's true meaning ends, a pure enjoyment of its addictive energy begins. Like a magic act, it's a bit frustrating to leave a show every time trying to figure out how the tricks worked. Sometimes it's best just to enjoy the mystery and give way to the ignorant bliss. Take OK Computer at face value and you will certainly be rewarded with an incredible aural experience.

BEN FRENCH | Ben founded NATN in the winter of 1998-1999 with fellow IU alums Troy Carpenter and Jonathan Cohen. During the day time, he's working for Nielsen Business Media, publisher of Billboard. Ben's favorite acts include Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys.