NME gives OK Computer 10 out of 10 as the reviews come in

James Oldham gave OK Computer 10 out of 10 in NME on 14 June, two days before the album came out), and called it a landmark record of the 1990s. NME also had Thom Yorke's description of the finished songs, Polaroids in my head¹, and a picture of him working on the lyrics through the night, in bed at dawn and up again at ten.

The only two reviews against the album are American. Keith Moerer, in Phoenix New Times, finds it all the more disappointing after The Bends, a band passing off self-indulgence as experiment. Pink Floyd, he says, at least made a few good albums before they got to this kind of thing, and he ranks OK Computer below Animals, which he counts a failure too. The Orlando Sentinel gives it two stars, 12 tracks of well-made filler with no tunes, though it likes the piano on “Karma Police”, which reminds it of Elton John at his most epic.

Moerer is not the only one to bring up Floyd. The New York Daily News thinks the studio work will one day be studied like The Dark Side of the Moon, and says Radiohead threaten to give art rock a good name with none of its worst habits, no noodling solos and no lyrics about dwarves. The Houston Press, giving four stars out of five, calls it a Dark Side of the Moon for the 1990s, and Mark Kemp, with four stars in Rolling Stone, takes it for a concept album about rock's old fear of a world run by computers. In Buenos Aires, Rodrigo Fresán writes in Página/12 that “Exit Music (for a Film)” carries more pathos in four minutes than Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet does in four hours.

Sara Scribner, in the Los Angeles Times, picks “Paranoid Android” as the album's clear highlight, though she doubts it will be a hit. Nobody can agree how it is built. The Gateway and Moerer count three parts; Spoke, the Conestoga College paper in Ontario, and the Chicago Tribune count four; NME splits it into two halves, guitar spasms on one side and choirs and calm acoustics on the other.

Colin Greenwood talked to the Chicago Tribune for a feature on Sunday 3 August, ahead of the band's headline show at the Riviera in Chicago on Thursday. They recorded in an apple shed and a house outside Bath, worked the arrangements out in jam sessions and tried the songs on two short tours last year. Eighty percent of the album is live, with us playing in a room together, but some of the songs, like 'Paranoid Android,' are live bits glued together¹⁵.

The reviews