NEW ALBUMS

Conor O’Brien’s new set of heavenly melodies and “agnostic devotionals” are enough to melt Danny Eccleston’s mind. Illustration by Jon Berkeley.

Villagers return, plus Jackson Browne, Dot Allison, and more.

“Everything feels a bit warped. Songs strike off in unexpected directions.”

Villagers ★★★★ Fever Dreams DOMINO. CD/DL/LP

IT’S NOT ALL Conor O’Brien’s fault if he’s perceived as a Connoisseurs’ Choice kind of artist.

An Ivor Novello award – very much the songwriter’s songwriter accolade – for 2010’s Becoming A Jackal, his first single as Villagers, set the trend. An Ivor for an entire album, 2015’s Darling Arithmetic, was to follow. Here’s a musician with chops his peers envy – Paul Weller once made O’Brien sign a Villagers album for him – and a writer skilled at pinning melody to a free-flowing stream of lofty ideas and sophisticated vocabulary. He’s an Elvis Costello de

nos jours. So why isn’t he a household name? Perhaps there’s a categorisation issue. In the first line of its entry on Villagers, the ever reliable Wikipedia has them down as “an Irish indie folk project from Dublin, created in 2008”. Whatever images that creates in the reader’s mind, it’s unlikely to correlate with O’Brien’s actual output, which is generically fluid and texturally diverse, the one common denominator being the sweetly stoic, slightly hurt treble of his singing. The single thing that justifies the ‘f’ word is the regular employment of an acoustic guitar.

In fact, Villagers albums have ranged widely, swinging between more organic, band-based outings and more oddball, studio-ised creations epitomised by second LP {Awayland} – MOJO Album Of The Month in 2013, a record influenced by O’Brien’s failed attempts to make a techno record and superseding another whim to make an album entirely of instrumentals.

Fever Dreams started a similarly long way from where it ended up, with full band sessions in a makeshift studio in Dublin in 2019. O’Brien’s band of three years’ standing – Ross Turner on drums, Danny Snow on bass, Kevin Corcoran and Brendan Jenkinson on keys – were road hardened and it was an assurance he hoped to capture. The material was only half-written; O’Brien wanted it to evolve. But the last booked day of the final session became the first day of lockdown in Ireland and O’Brien retreated to the attic of his Dublin flat and proceeded, in his own words, to go “a bit insane for a year and a half”.

This edge of madness – a sense of a record that has stewed in itself, fermented, and re-emerged in a surreal form its creator had not planned – is a large part of what makes Fever Dreams the free-est, fun-est, most psychedelic Villagers record so far. Everything feels a bit warped. Acoustic guitars and voices are varisped, meltysounding. Songs suddenly strike off in joyously unexpected directions. A guitar solo appears from space. Influences as diverse as Robert Wyatt, Alice Coltrane and library music maestro Piero Umiliani meet. “I was trying to get away from preciousness,” O’Brien tells MOJO, and he has.

But if that makes Fever Dreams sound like an album of textures and not of songs it would be misleading. The First Day starts with wobbly voice and piano aping the wow and flutter of an ancient gramophone and takes off with big, fritzing drums like Steve Drozd’s on The Soft Bulletin – but then it’s all about a heavenly melody, carried by glockenspielish synth, blithe brass and O’Brien’s voice, singing “feels like snowflake, feels like sunshine” like he’s never felt either before.

It’s only the first in a run of memorable and addictive tunes. Song In Seven is like taking a warm bath in sound – warmer, surely, than the nocturnal dip in the North Sea (with Ursa Major twinkling above) the lyric recounts. So Simpatico is an ecstatic mix of Burt Bacharach and What’s Going On, with O’Brien’s spoken interventions like Marvin on Save The Children. Momentarily – a slow jam about love’s redemptive power and its limits – is a sweet ache that sets in the bones.

In each case you’re struck by a new economy in O’Brien’s lyrics. A writer who’s tended to load his songs with the fruits of his erudition has learned, at the age of 37, to pare back. When we spoke around {Awayland}, O’Brien was full to the brim with sci-fi sage Kurt Vonnegut and cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Today, he gets more excited about Charles Wright & The 103rd Street Rhythm Band. “As you get older,” he tells MOJO, “you realise that music is where you need to go for the joy rather than the dread, the existential questioning.”

But this is 2021, and joy cannot be unconfined. O’Brien, who grew up in a churchgoing Catholic home during the first flush of revelations of institutional abuse and cover-up, is an agnostic, interested in exploring what he terms “the agnostic devotional” and troubled by the modern trend toward entrenching political and intellectual positions rather than opening them up for discussion. He’s taken to bingeing vintage TV talk shows

– William F. Buckley’s Firing Line and Channel 4’s once-notorious After Dark – now revealed as paradigms of pluralism. Out of that experience comes Circles In The Firing Line, with its forces of conflict and paranoia “fucking up my favourite dream”. A product of O’Brien’s attic sessions, it evokes the shouting-match of modern discourse with its collage of incongruent parts: an invasion of electronic squiggle, a full-fat guitar solo and a surprising boogie outro, with screaming.

And yet Fever Dreams isn’t ‘about’ modern malaises – or at least, only a bit. An alternate universe glimpsed from O’Brien’s attic, it’s also an escape that finds beautiful things to fixate on – that “agnostic devotional” again. The title track, with its music-box melody, ends in a woozy mantra of meshing voices intoning “the more I know, the more I care” – the album’s working title, says O’Brien. It melts (that word again) into the exquisite Deep In My Heart, the opiated show tune that brings the curtain down on

Fever Dreams in spectacular fashion. In it, O’Brien drinks deep of someone’s “moonshine soul remedy”. The song, too, is a magically simple brew; the philosophical callisthenics of earlier Villagers records remain on hold.

Whether this is the future for O’Brien’s music – one built on grooves and vibes and soul as much as words and ideas – remains to be seen. But it’s a wonderful present.