“Becoming a Jackal”
from the album Becoming a Jackal
2010
iTunes
Villagers, plural, is actually Irish singer-songwriter Conor O’Brien, singular. If the name suggests some fuzzy ground between band and solo, then so does the music, a cloudy, amorphous, ever-mutating blend of acoustic sensitivity and lush post-Radiohead atmospherics that all comes into focus around O’Brien’s clear, sweet voice.
As a musical species, singer-songwriters suffer from the law of diminishing returns. It is hard to deny the quality of most offerings but there are just too many sensitive souls playing instruments tastefully, singing beautifully, writing literately, and constructing songs the way so many great songs have been constructed before.
As might be anticipated from his label (Domino is the home of Arctic Monkeys and Animal Collective), O’Brien ventures into weirder, edgier territory, where elliptical arrangements suffuse delicate melodies and darkly, poetic lyrics with something ethereal and impossible to pin down.
From the ghostly pianos and strings of the haunting opening “I Saw the Dead” (with a delightfully casual opening gambit, “Have you got just a minute?”) to the romantic swoon of the title track, the electric intimacy of “Home” and howling heartbreak of “Pieces,” this is an album of multiple dimensions, cracked and tender but mad enough to conclude with a song about a Pope in spiritual crisis.
With his gorgeous debut, O’Brien joins Damien Rice and Bon Iver as standard bearers for a looser, stranger 21st-century form of singer-songwriting.