OK COMPUTER

OK Computer is Radiohead's most highly esteemed album, it's daring, adventurous, refreshing and ground-breaking. It has stretched the boundaries of alternative rock and with its clever melodious catchiness it has reached across all musical genre boundaries and surpassed the pigeonholing and box thinking of all genre purists.

A remarkable achievement making them deserving of all the mass recognition they received. But guess what? This album doesn't touch me. And I'm rather clueless why. It has everything for me to like it. But somehow the rocking parts don't sound as punchy and urgent as on The Bends, and the atmospheric bits don't have the impact that some of their later music has on me. Paranoid Android for instance sounds contrived to me, the Queen-inspired song development and vocal harmonies don't help. Only a couple of songs find a spontaneous balance between melodic catchiness and pensive post-rock avant-gardism, Let Down, No Surprises, Lucky and The Tourist sound truly great.

This album is nothing short of essential, it offers an interesting and ground-breaking mix of progressive and alternative rock elements, but somehow I have a strange relation with this album, liking it very much one time and a whole lot less the next time, strange.