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‘The Boys of Dungeon Lane’ by Paul McCartney

★★★★

Paul McCartney is “acting his age and defying it too, which is kind of the best of both worlds,” said Chris Willman in Variety. On his 20th solo album, the 83-year-old former Beatle keeps it “fresh and lively, and occasionally even fiery, but not by pretending that he’s a youngster.” Named after the area of Liverpool where McCartney spent part of his childhood, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a nostalgia trip—“mostly in the flagrantly commercial, engaging, oft-rocking style of a 1970s Wings record.” He duets with Ringo Starr on one track, while another looks back on his “platonic crush on George Harrison.” The “ode to friendship from the Cute One to the Quiet One is so romantic, you could almost swoon.” McCartney’s sheer joy “comes through in every chord change,” said Simon Vozick-Levinson in Rolling Stone. From “moving acoustic ballads” to a “trippy” ode to hiking and magic mushrooms, the artist’s “life force remains undimmed.” What’s more, the “simple, elegant arrangements” are mostly played by the man himself: He understands that what we want from a new McCartney solo album “at this stage in his career is more McCartney.”

‘Blue Morpho’ by Ed O’Brien

★★★

The second solo release from Ed O’Brien “feels like a do-over” that was very much worth the effort, said Ryan Reed in A.V. Club. The Radiohead guitarist and backing vocalist’s 2020 debut, Earth, was “a sonically rich album” that never quite found its footing; here, he taps into what that record got right and runs with it. Blue Morpho finds O’Brien “relying less on lyrics, leaning more into psychedelic atmospheres,” and embracing prog-rock catharsis on the final track, the nearly 10-minute “Obrigado”—a “genuinely affecting head trip laced with jazzy keyboards.” O’Brien is “out of his cocoon and in dazzling flight,” said Andrew Trendell in NME. In a reflection of the Brazilian butterfly that inspired the album’s name, the orchestral title track “floods the record with color,” with the guitarist drifting above the cinematic orchestration with “all the cool Zen of an Oxford-born Beck or a reborn Nick Drake.” On the funky “Teachers,” O’Brien delivers for “fans of the smoky, jazzier corners of Amnesiac, albeit with a lot more druggy euphoria.” This is a savory treat, full of “the secret sauce that O’Brien has always added to the Radiohead recipe.”

‘Little Wide Open’ by Kevin Morby

★★★

This is an album that, “in the best way, can’t quite work out what it thinks,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. On Kevin Morby’s eighth release, the Midwestern singer-songwriter is grappling with “the weird push and pull exerted by one’s hometown,” impending fatherhood, and introspection born of middle age. (On “Javelin,” he ponders: “Am I a has-been? Am I a husband?”) He’s aided by an impressive artistic lineup: The National’s Aaron Dessner produces, while Bon Iver lends his voice as a quasi–tornado siren and Lucinda Williams joins for a Springsteen-flavored monologue. Morby has delivered his “most cohesive, tuneful, and cleanly drawn” album yet, said Will Hermes in Pitchfork. It’s satisfying to watch an artist evolve steadily over the years and emerge as one of the “long-game players.” Here the folk-rock artist offers a “meditation on what happens when things aren’t falling apart” to arrive at “a balancing act of personal and universal that suggests an inverted Blood on the Tracks.” Set firmly in Middle America, Little Wide Open is the portrait of a musician becoming “more soulful, not less, as his sound grows more polished and inviting.”