Blue Morpho      Artist: Ed O'BrienLabel: Transgressive RecordsRock stars of a particular vintage have been singing about their midlife crises since the dawn of pop. But Blue Morpho, the captivating new record from Ed O’Brien, is different. He’s not putting his emotional struggles into words so much as trying to convey the claustrophobic quality of the ennui that gripped him during the pandemic and that he worried might drag him down and not let go.Angst and paranoia are hardly new territory for a member of Radiohead, a band that, since the 1990s, has specialised in the tortured pain of being a shy young man in a universe that, back in the day especially, demanded that blokes be boorish and chirpy. In a world of Jack the Lads they were the original Declan Downers – and the more successful they became, the greater their apparent misery.That was most obvious when Radiohead played 3Arena in Dublin in June 2017, a masterly gig that filled the room with joy even as the group brooded on stage, reluctant captives at their own party. What was not known then, even by the rest of Radiohead, was that O’Brien had had enough of the band. The fun had gone out of it, and when the pandemic arrived he initially tried to look on the bright side and use lockdown as an opportunity to hit pause and start over.But that isn’t how it worked out. With the world at a standstill, the guitarist seemingly became obsessed with his childhood, and with teachers who told him he’d never amount to anything. He has proved them wrong, of course, but that isn’t how it felt to O’Brien, who took to his bed, deep in a funk and doubting whether there was any point in drawing back the curtains again.His experience is a familiar lockdown one: the world stops and the bottom falls away. But in the case of O’Brien he had the ultimate coping mechanism in being a member of Radiohead and, therefore, being an old hand at redirecting his angst into towering prog-pop.And that’s the defining tone of an album that pulls off the familiar trick of being both bombastically bereft and compelling company. It’s the sobbing friend with whom you want to spend all night in the pub. In that respect it might be the most Radiohead side project to emerge from the mother ship, including Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s The Smile.A feeling of walls closing in and the ground falling away recurs across the seven-track LP. Blue Morpho starts quietly, however, with the acoustic Incantations, a Jeff Buckley-style coo into the shadows where he talks with terror about childhood memories coming back (“here comes the fear / and ghosts of love ago”).That starkness gives way to the experimental side of Radiohead – think the woozy string parts in Pyramid Song – on the title track. Named after a striking azure butterfly from South America, it plunges into the psychological undergrowth, with sumptuous chiming guitars and O’Brien’s falsetto buried in the mix.The idea that the classroom is the wellspring of adult pain is, of course, one of the ideas informing Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall – of which Blue Morpho feels of a piece thematically. That’s particularly true of Teachers, the most angular and unnerving tune here, with its skittering tempo and guitars so sharp you feel them poking you in the ribs. “A little way through life I just lost my way,” he says. The words will register with anyone who has suffered depression later in their middle years.The angst is unrelenting until, finally, the storm breaks on the closing track, Obrigado, a near 10-minute plunge into Floydesque prog overkill, where O’Brien wrenches his guitar like David Gilmour.From Radiohead to lockdown dread, he’s been on a trip. But Blue Morpho is more than just a recording from another rock star counting their troubles. It’s a beautiful album about an ugly period, and another dispatch from Radiohead’s workshop of woe that dwells in the darkness while making you appreciate the light.