Villagers

Interesting how much harm a little polish can do.

Conor O’Brien’s debut as Villagers, Becoming a Jackal, is a lovely record, real year-end list material; these weeks and months after my review I’m still listening, still finding his stridently Modernist lyrics some of the best on an indie pop-rock record, still enjoying his nuanced performances and his balanced but creative songwriting. But it wasn’t until watching him live—standing solo on a stark stage, plucking out spare renditions of his albums’ robust arrangements—that I could hear the guts of his material, the throb of these tortured songs. That I knew just how powerful a songwriter O’Brien is. Jesus, that voice. He sucked the air out of our lungs and into his own and used it to fill the underpopulated venue to seeming capacity.

He’s all the more potent a performer for his diminutive frame and unassumingly quiet rapport with the crowd. His was a performance defined by the slight noises rather than the pockless and sanitized studio products that were their referent – fingers on strings, the puckering sound as he prepared to sing, the depth he added by taking a step back from the mic. You’d think his chest would cave under the force of these confessions but he’s not singing in a damaged, Elliott Smith kind of way. The Villagers is panorama, our common guilt complexes writ large. Stripping out the album’s many organ washes, string sections and complex harmonies had the paradoxical effect of allowing the audience to better focus on the largeness of those lyrical themes. Rather than suiting the music to the discussion at hand and thereby obscuring, a little, that discussion, it was allowed instead to loom huge—antique, complex, individual; the songwriter’s tradition carried on in a quiet club in a sleepy town. I was lucky to have been there to see it.