Conor O'Brien earned comparisons to the likes of Conor Oberst, Damien Rice, and Glen Hansard on Villagers' 2010 debut Becoming a Jackal, and they were deserved on a musical level: as with Bright Eyes, the Frames, and Rice's solo work, Villagers start with humble folk and build outwards with daunting orchestral arrangements and subtle electronics. Implicit in those comparisons is the assumption of O'Brien as a similarly young old-soul, a world-weary troubadour who lives to fight an eternal struggle: How does one convey the truth to the listener without sounding like a pedant, or worse, a fool? Success is typically achieved in a way that parallels the expansive demeanor of the music: starting with the knowledge that everyone is at the very least an expert on their own experience, and using your own truth to project outwards towards larger ideas. That's where O'Brien breaks rank, as Villagers take the opposite approach on the occasionally charming but mostly frustrating {Awayland}, an album which too often has big ideas and little proof of how he arrived at them.
The charms are there, though. O'Brien's voice is expressive and controlled, hitting every quiver and quaver just right and there's an astringent, citric quality that allows the smallest amount to pierce through. His tone rarely rises above a conversation, yet it always manages to forefront itself no matter how grand the arrangements get behind him. And they certainly are grand, or at least the sound that Mercury Prize nominations were made for, folk-rock earthy and glossy as a gemstone, but grounded in an earnest presentation that counters any temptation to call it "slick." He's claimed the influence of film composers such as Lalo Schifrin, which mostly manifests in strings pulling all sorts of dips and derring-do over tense, tight minor chord progressions. (My guess is O'Brien would be disappointed if the two-minute instrumental that bisects {Awayland} was described as anything other than "cinematic.")
{Awayland} demonstrates admirable range in more traditional formats: "The Waves" is genuinely surprising, evolving from Morse code blips to a satisfying, frothy climax of distorted guitars, while "Nothing Arrived" situates a pat lyrical resolution ("I waited for something/ and something died/ so I waited for nothing/ and nothing arrived") amidst easygoing pianos and acoustics like a wordy rendering of Travis ca. 12 Memories. O'Brien does have a knack for melodies that hit squarely, but too much of {Awayland} prides itself in lyrical misdirection that renders his tunefulness an afterthought.
The misappropriated ambition is charming in an undergrad sort of way, and believe me, it will find an audience as long as college kids rubber-stamp indie-folk with poetic pretensions and the authenticity assumed from an Irish accent. O'Brien prefers giving his songs titles and choruses that are declarative ("Judgment Call", "Earthly Pleasure", "In a Newfoundland You Are Free") and images that suggest permanence-- trees, waves, and guns as loaded metaphors. And they often come across as trenchant out of context, such as "The Waves", which claims "one man's innocence is another's chance" in a way that overstates its profundity. Likewise, any one of these fragments from the unconvincingly sinister "Passing a Message" could evolve towards an insightful conclusion, but O'Brien structures his stories like Jenga puzzles, a lattice of solid pieces that feel intentionally and ultimately fated to crumble once shared: "I was carving my name out of a giant sequoia tree/ I was blind to its beauty now it's all I can see/ I learned how to listen to the folks on TV/ They are passing a message that means nothing to me."
"The Bell" is paradoxically the most overt demonstration of the strangely smug tone, an inverse "Bigmouth Strikes Again" that tries to find humor out of having nothing new to say. It is also a song about the futility of communication that is five minutes long and features lyrics like "there is a passenger in every useless word/ can never be twisted or sold/ senator of my skin/ a body of discipline/ must be a million years old." An extremely kind reading of it would be required to believe lines like the aforementioned are supposed to be self-deprecating, an intentionally purple exaggeration. Especially in light of a confession like "there's a sleeping dog under this dialog/ obedient only to rhyme/ but if I could beckon her/ if I could find the words/ all they would be is lies," which comes off like more of a boast than apology. To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O’Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.
