Sugar freaks

Radiohead put the noise back in pop

by Ted Drozdowski

Sonic terrorism is nearly a lost art among mainstream guitar bands these days. It's far easier, and trendier, to sample and loop. But ever since the twisted cosmonauts in the Pixies blasted the first monkey up to Heaven, some of the best punk-informed rock music has been made by geeks determined to force their guitars to do things Les Paul and Leo Fender never dreamt.

Right now there are few string-smacking chart contenders untempered by the homogenizing -- or techno-fired creative bowdlerization -- of modern rock. Among the best are Primal Scream, Catherine Wheel, and Radiohead. And Radiohead have beaten the others into the stores with their new OK Computer (Capitol), a big, neurotic ball of sounds and songs that promises to be one of the sonic saviors of the summer.

As on their previous albums -- Pablo Honey, which yielded '93's summer hit "Creep," and The Bends -- there's much more to Radiohead's latest than freaky waveforms. Singer/songwriter Thom Yorke filters life through the perspective of desperation and need with more beauty than any other contemporary angst-monger. Lyrics like "That's it sir you're leaving/The crackle of pig skin/The dust and the screaming/The yuppies networking/The panic/The vomit" stand as pointedly curious as the best of Black Francis before that big Pixie turned Frank. But the song those words bring to a climax -- the single "Paranoid Android" -- is so much more complicated than anything on Surfer Rosa or Doolittle that the tune's more a breathing being than the metallic husk its title would claim. Its narrator is troubled by voices, but he's imperious and deadly, jealous and -- yes -- paranoid, driven by an ego that demands recognition from even the heavens. Finally, perhaps believing himself to be God.

This is pretty complicated shit for a pop song. Yet it goes down smooth thanks to Yorke's beautiful lemon-butter voice. Yorke can push a note with the focus and grace a sea lion uses to loft a beach ball. Besides his writing, it's Yorke's gift for tone, intonation, and phrasing that makes Radiohead one of the best-sounding bands of the '90s. There's another reason, too: Johnny Greenwood, whose burps of rude guitar on "Creep" helped turn that song into such a headspinner. He's bitter to Yorke's sweet, crafty to Yorke's simple. He's also the main architect of Radiohead's noisy experimentation.

Greenwood knows that good music tells a story as much as good lyrics do. He pairs a soft bed of gently strummed acoustic guitars to the opening croon of "Paranoid Android." Yet when Yorke is sputtering into the bridge like Johnny Rotten, Greenwood's guitar is belching out a burst of bile, sucking it back in, and regurgitating it before hurling into a knotty screaming fit of a solo.

By the time of this outburst, Greenwood and fellow guitarist Ed O'Brien have already spun two pretty guitar melodies around Yorke's text. And there's no shortage of them in the rest of the song -- or, for that matter, throughout Radiohead's numbers.

Melodies are another of the band's great strengths. Some last just a few measures, doing their pretty business and cutting out; others strut the length of an entire verse or chorus. And they don't always come via guitar; on OK Computer there are sampled celestial vocal choirs, string sounds (though one of the coolest is Greenwood's cello-toned guitar, which begins "Airbag" and metamorphoses into an ersatz oud by the end of the tune), little burbles and expansive pads of synthesizer, and the many vocal filigrees Yorke adds behind his lead singing. Radiohead understand that all these melodies make the Draino go down in the most delightful way. And that a good melody makes a lead vocal the most memorable part of a song. That's why we might not know what the hell Zen gardener Yorke's really singing about in the radio hit "Green Plastic Trees" (from '95's The Bends), yet we can still sing the tune two years later.

But try singing along to the cycling feedback loop that sounds like a pondful of frogs at night on "Lucky," or the mechanized vocal dogma of "Fitter, Happier" that actually turns Yorke into an android. Terrorists, whether sonic or otherwise, strike when they're not expected, and the results leave us at the least stunned or transfixed -- as they do in these songs.

Happily, we're talking about pop here, not blowing up buildings. So though OK Computer's ditties spew hardscrabble stories of man's inhumanity to himself, we do get our sugar fix. Yorke's always generous with the sweets, which also flow from flourishes like the chiming guitar and glockenspiel nursery-rhyme theme in "No Surprises" and the wide-open prairie of slide-guitar-dominated texture in "Subterranean Homesick Alien" that beckons to Meddle-era Pink Floyd. Radiohead are a group of sonic guerrillas smart enough to take care of themselves in these dangerous declining days of modern-rock radio, and of us as well.