Another good Radiohead side project… no surprises here
We should have guessed – Radiohead is too interesting for any one of its members to slack off. Neither Kid A nor In Rainbows could have been made by people who didn’t share a singular vision, let alone a great one. Yes, all five of these musicians carry their own weight, a fact to which guitarist Ed O’Brien’s most recent solo album – which he’s released under the moniker EOB – is the latest testament. Though it is outshined by a string of masterpieces spawned by Radiohead, such as Jonny Greenwood’s film scores and Thom Yorke’s marvelous Anima, Earth is more fully realized than a side project needs to be. It is the lively, commercial counterpart to Radiohead’s melancholy, yet the optimism that pervades Earth feels more like a genuine philosophy than a marketable calculation. O’Brien centers the album around themes of love, loyalty and acceptance, and he supplements the big ideas with lush, diversified sounds that lend the record a sense of emotional awareness. O’Brien doesn’t take every risk that Radiohead would have seized as a collective, but Earth still contains flashes of the skill and nuance that the legendary band likely wouldn’t be the same without.
“Deep Days” marks the listener’s realization that this is an unexpectedly varied record. The opener, “Shangri-La,” is a loosely funky number named after the fictional utopia featured in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Tugged ahead by a gradual, enticing crescendo, the song is simultaneously catchy and alluring, almost as if O’Brien is trying to trademark the term “mysterious fun.” “Shangri-La” feels surprisingly tight at just under six minutes, as does “Brasil,” the record’s defining track. A tender acoustic passage softly backs O’Brien’s longing message for a lost spirit: “How much more of this to take/ to see you smile and laugh again.” It’s not a song you would expect to evolve into an irresistible dance beat, but some careful pacing and remarkable patience make for an impossibly seamless transition. “Deep Days,” a bluesy strut with a southern flavor, may be more conventional than the track that precedes it, but you have to appreciate O’Brien’s aversion to cutting and pasting.
Other bonuses include “Long Time Coming,” which is charming without the clichés you might hear over the radio at a coffee shop. “Mass” is accentuated by a dreamy, pulsing guitar and background vocals that sound as though they’re pleasantly possessed, while “Olympik” is a restless, computer-driven sprint through dreamy, spiraling synthesizers.
The sheer momentum that propels Earth through its 46 minutes almost seems to argue a case for O’Brien, who has been a soft-spoken yet valuable asset for his main musical act. In a recent interview with NME, drummer Philip Selway deemed 2020 a “kind of year away from Radiohead,” attributing the temporary split to the band’s commitment to new solo projects. The hiatus will surely upset some fans, but if Earth is at all a taste of what these projects will be like, perhaps the break will (eventually) be forgiven.
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