Because a week after seeing them live I still can't shake this angsty disposition and while being brought up on OK Computer immunised me to the circle-jerk impact of its supposed ground-breaking-ness, alas, it sounds to me like alternative rock should and not much more than that, there's definitely something special about it and while part of that might be its conceptual greatness- disgust at the modern world, the belief that the worldwide victory of a capitalist rhetoric means we won't be seeing any grand dystopian futures but rather we're already living one- lyrical fragments of introspection, sci-fi paranoia, advertising, suicide, the triumph of technology, and so on, it's the individual moments which both drive these points home and make the record more than just a cliched pick for greatest album ever- the wacky guitars on Paranoid Android sounding like a surrealist road-trip to hell, the numerous indecipherable moans, and most of all the scream at the end of Climbing Up the Walls, which, yeah this'll sound cheesy 'cause it is, becomes the post-modern The Scream as the aforementioned lyrical fragments build and bombard the narrator's head exactly as paranoia, ads, technologies bombard the heads of his listeners, a swirling mess of guilt, history (the climax being a guitar-pop rendition of Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima), alienation, over-saturation of information, motorways, millionaires, aliens, robots, in short the post-modern condition, so that what could be left but a scream through the narrator and through nature and through the listener resulting in a secret ending where the whirlwind passes and the solution is suicide (No Surprises (god they're depressing)), but then secretly it's just takin' it easy (so don't go do that). Because its concept requires it be so dense and messy, everybody has their own little set of special moments found within the chaos, and maybe that's why it seems so immortal
A+
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