Album of the week: Ed O’Brien – 'Blue Morpho'

Leading into the release of his second solo album, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien has been upfront about the darkness that prefigured the light.

After Radiohead’s last world tour (that is, not counting last autumn’s 20 shows in five European cities), in 2016/18, he felt done – burned out and bummed out with the life of the rock star member of a big band. As part-corrective he released, under the name EOB, solo debut Earth – a record inspired by him and his family’s time living in Brazil – in early 2020, right as the Covid pandemic hit. Then, during the lockdowns, at his home in Wales, he started falling. Emotionally, mentally, helplessly.

But in the Welsh countryside he eventually found healing, in nature and in music. It was a time of rebirth and ritual, a process documented in a lovely short film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, directed by Kit Monteith.

“The midlife crisis, or whatever you wanna call it…” O’Brien, 58, began, searching for the words, as he launched the film at North London’s Screen on the Green cinema in March. “We as a society call it mental health… But mental health doesn’t feel like an adequate description. It’s something way fucking deeper than that. It really is. It’s a crisis in your soul.”

But he was one of the lucky ones.

“I’m very blessed, [with] my day-job. [In] the mothership, Radiohead, I don’t have a boss. I don’t have to go to work. So I don’t have to medicate to get through it. So I was able to really be in it. Then it’s like alchemy – as musicians or creators, we take this stuff, this darkness. And there’s a beauty in darkness.”

That beauty is now here in the seven songs that make up Blue Morpho. Named, as all we lepidopterists know, after the magnificent butterfly found in Central and South America, it’s 38 minutes of incantatory, rhythmic soul-seeking. A truth-chasing odyssey around the sun of O’Brien’s psyche, weaving a beguiling path between psych rock and prog rock, with the route plotted by producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence and the Machine) – the perfect space cowboy companion for O’Brien given the sky-high/soul-deep explorations of his own 2020 solo album Voyager.

It starts, appropriately enough, with ‘Incantations’, a seven-minute-plus indie-shamanic groove. The title track opens with birdsong, and with glorious strings and a winding, entwining melody that would hold their own on Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. On ‘Sweet Spot’ O’Brien’s voice, reliably in-the-pocket supplying harmonies stage-right with Thom Yorke, is a breathed, murmured, considered delight.

Then, with the hypnotic funk of ‘Teachers’, O’Brien circles back to how we, eventually, got here. “Midway through life I just lost my way, lost my way,” he intones, before the band – featuring fabulously limber guitarist Dave Okumu (Jessie Ware, Anna Calvi) – let rip with a cosmic, shape-throwing breakdown (the good kind). O’Brien may have lost himself but here, at least, he finds himself on the dancefloor.

O’Brien pushes out even further on the final ‘Obrigado’, a near-10-minute stretch of healing that suggests tropicália remixed by DJ Shadow. In an album that artfully mixes exquisite vibes, songwriting production and “feels”, this final epic is primus inter pares: a Floydian broadcast from the dark side of the moon that heralds a man coming back down to earth – back to himself – with a life-giving bump.