Villagers / Charlotte Gainsbourg: "Memoir” / “Set the Tigers Free"

Interesting to hear a personality like Gainsbourg absorbed by songwriting as strong as Conor O’Brien of Villagers. I’m still in love with his take on traditional modernism on last year’s Becoming a Jackal, and it seems that little of his cyclical arrangements and playfully ambiguous lyrics have changed. But swap in Gainsbourg’s breathy, slurred vocals and “Memoir” seems like a strange, if hauntingly beautiful track. Strange because Gainsbourg seems better suited to mid-tempo and lounge than to Villagers’ intricate folk. Beautiful precisely because of this intriguing combination.

The story goes that Gainsbourg approached O’Brien to write a song for her, and he did so in the spare bits of time between touring. And so she seems to be continuing in the vein of her fairytale arrangement of getting some of the best singer-songwriters to build her cities over which to rule.

Strange also is an unnecessary recasting of O’Brien’s Jackal track “Set the Tigers Free”—strange, because it doesn’t do much to change the already very strong song, and because the song that truly does beg an expansion is “The Meaning of the Ritual,” whose live version is absolutely devastating. Still, this 7” is a timely revisit of one of 2010’s best albums—a reminder that O’Brien is out there walking the world, and that he is, apparently, getting noticed.