OK Computer reviewed in a Spanish sports daily and four campus papers

MARCA, the Spanish sports daily, reviewed OK Computer on its leisure page last August, between a film review and a feature on hydrospeed, river sledging in the western Pyrenees. It reads the album as a trip into a technological future, driven by helplessness before a world that runs on computers. The band have moved on from Pablo Honey and The Bends to more electronic instruments, and “Fitter Happier” shows what a voice synthesiser can do. MARCA calls the result English pop-rock, with songs that at times move at the pace of a story set to music.

In Brazil the same month, Antonio Celso Barbieri wrote in Dynamite that the album holds no surprises for anyone who already knows Radiohead. Thom Yorke's voice dominates it and the guitars and backing vocals give it a 1970s texture. The band stand out from the English pack by keeping commercial arrangements out. He finds “The Tourist” arranged and sung in the manner of King Crimson.

The American student papers were warmer. In Provo, Utah, Chris Peterson and Brian Blair of Brigham Young University's Daily Universe called it possibly the best alternative record of the decade, a digital version of Pink Floyd's The Wall. They described the sessions at St Catherine's Court, a house outside Bath, where the band played in the ballroom, Yorke sang some tracks in a cold stone entrance hall and Nigel Godrich engineered from the library.

Dan Barlo, on the front page of The Chronicle at Purdue University Calumet in Indiana, gave it 10, the top of the paper's scale. He says Radiohead dodged a Joshua Tree-style follow-up to The Bends. It is an album about suburbs and office towers, he says, but mostly about airports, and “Paranoid Android” breaks the rules of song construction with no chorus he can find.

Short of new releases and money after the holidays, Rick Sieber of the Goshen College Record in Indiana chose an album of the year for 1997 instead and picked OK Computer. He rates “Let Down” masterful, and his reservations are some pretension and a first half stronger than the second. On Friday, Vanessa Floyd of The Catalyst, Colorado College's paper, called it Radiohead's third and best album, one to hear start to finish on headphones doing nothing else. She sets it beside Miles Davis's Bitches Brew as difficult and erratic, and expects “Fitter Happier”, the two-minute synthesised monologue, to be the track listeners skip.

The reviews