Ed O’Brien’s Blue Morpho is an album born out of darkness. In 2020 he had just released his first album Earth under the moniker EOB, an album that had been slowly coming together around the schedule of the band he had been in since his teenage years, Radiohead. Then COVID struck and the world turned inward. By winter of 2020 O’Brien had fallen into a black hole of depression and, barely able to function, his wife Suzi persuaded him that the only way out of the pain was to go through it. In the depths of a dark year O’Brien followed the teachings of the Dutch athlete/philosopher Wim Hof which led to the practice of deep breathing and shallow tubs of cold water to induce focus. He would then hole up in his small London studio and play guitar until his brain was exhausted.
O’Brien had no plan in mind for how the music would evolve, and with Thom Yorke’s mantra of “being a good librarian—cataloguing ideas when they happened, finding them later to revisit” he blew the dam that had been holding back years of “emotional trauma and turmoil”. All that darkness, smelted in the crucible of COVID, should have returned an album that would make a pessimist seem cheery but far from it. Blue Morpho is a sonic journey that encompasses some minor keys en route but also some sun to warm the melancholy. It has subtle shifts from the rotating acoustic folk of Nick Drake and Paul Giovanni to some deeply engrossing electronica and trip-hop. Those catalogued ideas were drawn together with producer Paul Epworth in his London studio, a 200-year old stone church and featured a number of contributing musicians such as David Okumu on guitar and Shabaka Hutchings on flute.
‘Incantations’ opens the album with an eastern-vibe and vocals that hug the landscape of the song. The idea of evoking through incantation makes this a perfect opening track, as if it was created while sitting in front of a bubbling cauldron with good and bad spirits beginning to emanate from the steam and spinning around the room to the song’s crescendo. Estonia’s Tõnu Kõrvits provided the lush string arrangements that can be heard on the title track ‘Blue Morpho’ (video below) and evokes the heart-stopping work of Harry Robinson for Nick Drake’s ‘River Man’ or David Arnold for Björk’s ‘Play Dead’.
At the mid-point we get ‘Teachers’ where the tempo quickens and the propulsive bass line, firework drums and a crazy guitar solo swarming with effects, could easily drive the plot in a Steven Soderbergh film or a classy noir drama. ‘Solfeggio’ (the practice of using tones and notes in sound therapy) has the confluence of inner mind and outer space as it pulsates hypnotically and ‘Thin Places’ has overlapping flutes provided by Shabaka Hutchings which are like a zen murmuration of birds at dusk.
Much as many aspects of the album capture the countryside of Wales where O’Brien has found a home, the final track is ‘Obrigado’, a nod to time spent with his young family in Brazil. It’s a track in two-halves, starting with a bossa heartbeat that could power a thousand Kruder & Dorfmeister remixes, before heading into a midsection that gives ‘Great Gig In The Sky’ vibes with the guitar soaring alongside the vocals. Given that a Blue Morpho is a stunning blue butterfly that O’Brien encountered in Brazil, you can imagine this half of the song is soundtracking thousands of them giving flight to see the album off in an iridescent finale.
It’s dreadful that Ed O’Brien had to fight through a dark night of the soul, as so many did during the pandemic, but though Blue Morpho was hard-won it is brilliantly executed. Its glorious arc draws you in from the outset and holds your attention right through to the shimmering end. Music can heal the artist through its creation but then its job is to head off into the world to pay it forward to the listener; it does this beautifully.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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