Conor O'Brien, slight-framed leader of earnest folk-rock project Villagers, tells his publicist he's "terrified of bands." No wonder: The Dublin-based singer and songwriter's former group, the Immediate, imploded three years ago over "existential differences." In February 2009, hometown label Any Other City released Villagers' The Hollow Kind EP. There's a YouTube video from around the same time where O'Brien can be seen fronting at least a quartet, and the performance is stirring, though the guy looks a bit like Conor Oberst and Tracey Thorn in a "how would their kids be?" Photoshop mash-up.
Much as Oberst has wrestled with his own identity crises, shifting from Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos to his given name, Villagers' debut album obsesses over the gap between electric band and acoustic troubadour. In a recent appearance on "Later... With Jools Holland", O'Brien performed solo; in fact, he plays almost every instrument on Becoming a Jackal, and his portentous lyrics, falsetto-prone quaver, and Simon & Garfunkel tunefulness are essential to the album's appeal. At the same time, the record is a bit more varied than the typical singer-songwriter drabness-- check the Battles-battling drum break at the end of mask fable "Ship of Promises", the bossa nova lilt to the Leonard Cohen breakup of "Set the Tigers Free", or the jarring crash that ends orchestral-pop opener "I Saw the Dead". O'Brien promises to "meet you in between what I say and what I mean," and he's savvy enough to know the difference.
It seems significant that Villagers signed to Domino, a label better known for Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, and Animal Collective; O'Brien recently told Brooklyn Vegan that Cass McCombs, another singer-songwriter with indie-rock appeal, was the matchmaker. So sure, O'Brien's falsetto-prone quaver suggests the righteous sincerity of Irish vocalists from Bono to Damien Rice and Glen Hansard, but Becoming a Jackal's title track-- also its first single-- keeps 21st-century disillusionment beneath its sepia-toned teenage dreams: "Before you take this song as truth/ You should wonder what I'm taking from you." In a recent Resonant Frequencies column, Pitchfork's Mark Richardson talks about the thin line between maudlin and sublime, and to be sure, effort-laden over-seriousness occasionally combines with a tendency toward lazy rhymes here to put dirges like "The Meaning of the Ritual" and "To Be Counted Among Men" slightly on the wrong side of that divide.
Still, if you're willing to follow O'Brien over the top, there are glimmers of I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, or even that fleeting moment on Funeral when the Arcade Fire break out into a Motown bounce. "Pieces", the song Villagers perform in that old live YouTube clip, reappears on Becoming a Jackal, still exploring that line between band and balladeer, but also person and persona, emotion and cheap sentiment. Amid doo-wop piano and lofty strings, O'Brien describes the dilemma of the public artist who airs private confessions: "There's a way down/ That I wish I had not found/ You split yourself in two/ One for them and one for you." Shoring these fragments against the ruins of modern-day romance, O'Brien before long starts howling like a wolf, or a jackal, or a singer-songwriter, or a band leader. It's worth watching to see what he-- and Villagers-- will become next.
