It’s cerebral it has a unifying concept some tracks eschew straightforward rock song structures in favor of greater complexity contemporary classical music serves as an occasional reference point many of the arrangements have a symphonic flavor and prog’s paradigmatic Mellotron features on several tracks. It’s ironic that an alternative rock group whose existence is part of punk’s legacy should, for its best work to date, revive a genre that was anathema to punk: OK Computer is the Britpop generation’s most accomplished prog rock album. It stands not only as a landmark for the band but as a landmark in British rock of the ’90s. Now that’s special.Īfter the transitional sophomore album, OK Computer is a dense, multifaceted record that attests to a considerable evolution. (Reprised in this context, “My Iron Lung” makes perfect sense: “We’re too young to fall asleep / Too cynical to speak / We’re losing it can’t you tell?”) Meanwhile, guitarists Greenwood and Ed O’Brien tickle and rattle with a staggering array of clever instrumental approaches, building a complex web of energy and anger, frustration and hopelessness - all in the guise of accessible pop songs. His response to pain is chemical anesthesia he dreams of being “Bullet Proof” and chooses unconsciousness over confrontation. Everything here is fake or broken Yorke is cynical, vulnerable and exhausted. Produced, as was the EP, with a minimum of fuss by John Leckie, The Bends constantly undersells itself, which makes Yorke’s expressions of acceptable angst all the more dismally seductive. He then proceeds to savagely yawn and moan his way through such vague miseries for the entirety of this provocative testament to faded glamour and crepuscular youth. “Am I really sinking this low?…I wish it was the ’60s / I wish I could be happy / I wish I wish I wish that something would happen,” sings Yorke in the disconsolate title track of The Bends. The Beatlesy title track is an intriguing digression, but the lyrics (“This is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time”) only reinforce the structural resemblance to Radiohead’s previous bout of ego failure. That’s progress of a sort, though only “The Trickster” and “Permanent Daylight” have the compositional clarity to take advantage. The five noncommittal new tracks on My Iron Lung deconstruct the first album’s ingredients, leaving a simpler, less evidently contrived and casually produced sound. The acoustic “Thinking About You” is a fine, sensitive love song that suggests a solemn intelligence beneath the media-conscious bluster. While other tracks exploit that dynamic tension (“Blow Out” detonates the first half’s jazzy daintiness with Greenwood’s howling wind tunnel noise demonstration and Phil Selway’s Keith Moon drum bursts), a few remove the electro-shock therapy completely. The fervent, nearly spiritual view of alienated ambition stated in the rousing and catchy “Anyone Can Play Guitar” cuts much closer to the bone and seems truer to the band’s actual desires: “Destiny protect me from the world…I wanna be Jim Morrison.” In a similar musical vein, “Ripcord” uses a twin-guitar roar and Yorke’s impassioned singing (sometimes layered into Byrdsy harmonies) to good effect, lashing out at the quiet melodic lines with aggressive, edgy noise assaults. Jonny Greenwood’s choking guitar explosions are far more corrosive, but they’re not what the song is about. The single’s comforting admission of worthlessness (“I wish I was special, so fucking special, but I’m a creep”) predates Beck’s “Loser” by a year, but Thom Yorke’s vocals are too self-consciously drab to be convincing.
The Oxford quintet has one bad habit (trying to sound like a young English U2) and several good ideas on Pablo Honey, although “Creep” is not chief among them. And that was just the beginning for a group that has become a global superpower, a successor of sorts to a band that first set out to emulate. That makes the enormous creative growth between Pablo Honey and The Bends all the more admirable. It’s usually safe as milk to assume that bands who make splashy entrances - as England’s Radiohead did, with a gimmicky self-deprecating US debut (“Creep”) that slyly “fuck”ed its way up the charts - have no place to go but down.