One of Radiohead’s two guitarists steps off the beaten path with an album whose slender beauty invites surrender.
In the curious forest-set short film The Three Act Play that accompanies the release of Blue Morpho, acting almost as a note of intent, we briefly see Ed O’Brien filling a glass water bottle from a stream.
But listening to this first album under his own name (Earth in 2020 bore his acronym EOB) one senses that the Radiohead guitarist has grasped something precious, drawn from him along a turbulent current. That current, we learn, is the long unsettled path that guided him out of the torments of depression.
Nevertheless, one need not be privy to the musician’s existential crisis: what he shares about his convalescence holds its own grace. It first greets us with Incantations, establishing a meditative atmosphere before he raises his folk mantras toward a tranquil trance.
Throughout the album, and especially thanks to its strings, the voice intermittently evokes Thom Yorke, yet brought to warmer and more humane frequencies. A continuity embraced with Radiohead that sometimes gives the album the feel of an intimate Amnesiac.
More fragile but above all more convincing than the EOB detour, Blue Morpho, which takes its title from a delicate and majestic butterfly as bucolic as its title-track, is nourished by the pastoral atmospheres of Wales where producer Paul Epworth managed to seize the waves at the guitarist’s soul. The arrangements by Estonian Tõnu Kõrvits, an admirer of Arvo Pärt, greatly contribute to the slender beauty of the whole.
Strangely for an album that favors long, expansive passages, it is on the two shorter tracks—placed in a tight sequence—that a tunnel effect becomes perceptible. The layers of Solfeggio and Thin Places merely pass by and curiously pierce the B-side between its two most substantial tracks: the obstinate Teachers and the closing Obrigado, which offers a moment of communicative gratitude before fading away with that wandering sense of dissolution that cloaks this beautiful record, whose credits also include the much sought-after Shabaka Hutchings.
One thus thinks that after, among other things, the superb albums signed by The Smile and the thrilling Thom Yorke collaboration with Mark Pritchard at Warp, the post-Radiohead era is far from lacking inspiration.
Blue Morpho (Transgressive Records/Firebird/PIAS). Released on May 22. Live at Salle Pleyel, Paris, on October 8.
