Unlike his bandmates’ forays in electronica or contemporary classical, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien’s solo debut looks fondly back at the kind of British rock his own group abandoned.
For all of the radical reinventions Radiohead have undergone over the past 30-odd years—the shift to experimental electronica, the redrafting of instrumental roles, Thom Yorke’s ponytail—guitarist Ed O’Brien has always remained guitarist Ed O’Brien. Amid the flurry of instrument swapping and machine tweaking that occurs at a typical Radiohead concert, O’Brien is rarely without his six-string and trusty bank of effects pedals, while his backing vocals often provide a crucial melodic underpinning for Yorke’s flights of fancy. That grounding principle carries over to his first proper solo album. Where Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have used their extracurricular projects to further explore dissonant techno and avant-garde orchestration, O’Brien’s debut as EOB revisits the late-’80s/early-’90s student-disco sounds that gave rise to his main gig. While his bandmates are going on about Flying Lotus and Oliver Messiaen, O’Brien is preaching the life-changing effects of Screamadelia.
That said, Earth isn’t your typical guitar-based rock record. Inspired in part by O’Brien’s year-long stint living in Brazil in 2012, the album was initially conceived as a solo electronic effort before exposure to the country’s famed Carnival festivals prompted a more communal, celebratory approach. While he stopped short of making a batucada album, he did rally an all-star cast—including producer Flood, Radiohead bassist Greenwood, Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley, and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche—to infuse the songs with a more physical spirit. The opening “Shangri-La” was actually written after an all-nighter at the eponymous Glastonbury DJ stage, and though this wiry rocker is more Blur than PLUR (thanks to O’Brien’s uncannily Coxon-esque chorus), the track exudes a playfully scrappy energy and hedonic swagger that greatly distinguish it from any other Radiohead-related product. The record eventually achieves its true peak-hour potential on “Olympik,” which sounds like an Achtung Baby-era U2 song stretched out into a sweaty, !!!-style punk-funk workout.
Between those high points, Earth can feel less like a dance-festival communion and more like the lonely, meandering trek back to your pup tent in the dark. The album’s more robust rhythmic exercises are counterbalanced by mellow meditations, and while these yield some affecting moments (like “Cloak of the Night,” a sort of coffeehouse “Dear Prudence” duet with Laura Marling), the songwriting isn’t captivating enough to sustain momentum during Earth’s simmered-down stretches. “Deep Days” comes on with bald, brow-raising expressions of desire but neuters them in a foot-dragging acoustic-soul lurch, while the atmospheric textures that envelop folk sketches like “Mess” and “Sail On” aren’t enough to compensate for their slight, vaporous melodies. Even when O’Brien suddenly detours from campfire tropicalia into Hacienda bacchanalia partway through “Brasil,” the track plateaus when it should soar, as if the mere novelty of flipping the switch was enough to justify riding out its mid-tempo Madchester groove past the eight-minute mark.
For an album rooted in the idea of connectedness, Earth feels more like a mood board of ideas in search of a through line. Nowhere is the record’s jumbled quality more pronounced than on “Banksters,” a song O’Brien wrote in response to the 2008 financial crash. Hating on the 1 percent has hardly gone out of style since then, but the song’s vitriol and strident topicality feel out of place on an album otherwise occupied with more personal and spiritual concerns. And while the fact that “Banksters” sounds like a bossa-nova “Paranoid Android” may appeal to that faction of old-school Radiohead fans who still rue the day Thom Yorke bought his first Aphex Twin record, it ultimately seals Earth’s fate as the sort of tasteful, tentatively adventurous post-Britpop record that would’ve gotten sandwiched between Elbow and South on a “next Radiohead” listicle 20 years ago.
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