OK COMPUTER

They don't like to be associated with prog, but there's no denying that on OK Computer Radiohead went full-on art rock. Whilst I don't think it's a five-star classic - it flags a little too much in the second half for that, and Fitter, Happier is just too ludicrously over the top and juvenile for words - it does attain higher peaks than any prior Radiohead album.The album's masterpiece is, of course the pocket symphony which is Paranoid Android - beginning as a political rant, segueing into a strung-out hymn and then returning to the angry diatribe for the conclusion, and in the course of all this proving to the alternative rock crowd that there was something to be gained from cribbing from updating the ideas of the art rock heroes of the past.