"What has always impressed me the most with this album is that for all the wonderfully dense layers of orchestration, non-standard time signatures, distorted/chopped/warped sounds, and mournful lyrical imagery, it has a flirtatious relationship with popular music. OK Computer is an unintentional pop record, one of those albums that would seem an impossible hit if you broke the components apart. It is this very unscriptable element that makes it so effective; the best subversion in pop culture comes from the inside out."
John Baizley of Baroness on Radiohead's 1997 masterpiece.
Baizley's comments appear alongside similarly enthusiastic appraisals by the likes of Marissa Nadler, Benjamin Power (Fuck Buttons and Blanck Mass), Will Butler and Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire) and DJ Shadow in this Pitchfork article, one of a series of pieces marking the album's twentieth anniversary. Of the others, Barry Walters' reminiscences of first hearing and then reviewing the LP for Spin is worth a look.
Unsurprisingly, Pitchfork isn't the only music site to pay tribute to OK Computer. Here's Louder Than War's Simon Tucker on the album's forward-thinking approach and predictive powers: "OK Computer was the right album for the right time and maybe that time is now."
Wednesday, April 05, 2017
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