Conor O’Brien and Villagers are making another splash

Conor O’Brien and his Villagers have tweaked their sound again for their fourth album, writes Eoghan O’Sullivan

It's less than a month until the 10-year anniversary of the first Villagers shows, three support slots at Whelan’s, under Irish bands Halves and the Chapters, and the Californian troubadour Cass McCombs.

“That’s mad,” says Conor O’Brien from his Dublin city centre apartment, on the eve of a three-day media outing to Germany and a week out from resuming touring duties, recalling the journey over the last decade. Not that he’s in a particularly reflective or reminiscent mood. And why should he be with fourth studio album The Art of Pretending to Swim just released to the world?

There’s a freedom in the nine tracks therein that hasn’t previously been prevalent with Villagers. Though there are the omnipresent existential fears and a delve into faith, there’s a groove lightly weaving its way throughout.

“I think there was a concerted effort on my part to make that happen, with the arrangements,” he says. O’Brien wrote, recorded, mixed, mastered, and produced the album himself.

“A lot of the songs act as internal pep talks and so they’re kinda groovy, but I guess the act of making them groovy is what they’re about, the idea that you can lift yourself out of certain things. I just didn’t want to write about dark things that were happening in my life. I guess I half-succeeded, but I guess the best ‘happy music’, or whatever you want to call it, has usually got lots of different shades in it and I wanted that to come across on this album.”

MOVING SOUND

Whether it’s restlessness, boredom, or excitement, Villagers’ sound never stays still. From the rock edges of second album Awayland, Darling Arithmetic saw O’Brien, 35, put himself on display with little more than his acoustic and some lulling orchestration — ‘Courage’ and ‘Little Bigot’ left little to the imagination.

The Art of Pretending to Swim sweeps the table again the breakup song ‘Love Came With All That It Brings’ even features a soul sample that was hesitant to use at first. “Then I thought, ‘F**k it, it’s what I want to do, let’s keep going with this.’”

O’Brien admits the writing of the album didn’t come easy. “I always have moments where it feels easy but it’s always quite stressful writing. I feel a real mixture of very brief moments of ecstasy and peace and all these amazing meditative feelings, and then long drawn-out periods of fear that nothing will ever come to you ever again, and sitting at a black page and just not really knowing who you are or what you’re meant to put on that page, and then after a year or so you realise that there’s all this stuff that happened when you weren’t really noticing. It’s a weird one. I rarely remember the moments when I wrote the stuff, that always seems quite elusive.”

CHIPPING AWAY

He spent a couple of years making the album and says sometimes he wishes he had more to show.

“I’m not hugely prolific but I’m chipping away all the time. it annoys me how... Obviously I enjoy it — I don’t want this to be a downer — but I wish the amount of work I put into it was slightly more weighted towards the quantity that I get out of it,” he admits, laughing, before again displaying that newfound freedom that permeates Villagers in 2018. “But you can’t control these things, you just have to let it happen.”

O’Brien says he took responsibility for the album from start to finish because he sees it all as one expression. He considers the words and themes in the same way as the studio’s knobs, bells, and whistles; ‘Sweet Saviour’, the album standout, is evidence of this. It’s a track constantly on edge and one that is already a live highlight.

“I see it all as a piece of the same puzzle and I really enjoy trying to put that puzzle together, it’s kind of a big thing for me, being in control of all of the aspects of it. There’s a lot of aspects to this album that I never really went near with any of the other albums,” he says, adding, with a snigger, “There’s loads of subliminal stuff going on that you can catch if you’re listening on headphones. It’s probably an addiction, it’s probably not good, it’s probably something that I need to get looked at, but whatever.”

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

The press ahead of the release of The Art of Pretending to Swim seemed heavier than for the previous releases — and the singles have been A-listed on the influential BBC 6 Music station — testament to the growing fanbase and attention now on O’Brien. He doesn’t necessarily enjoy it though.

“You write the stuff but you’re not thinking about the themes as you’re writing them, you’re feeling them out and you’re feeling the music out, so when you have to be articulate about it, in a black and white way, it doesn’t really make so much sense to me,” he admits.

“I see it as testament to your music and your art if you’ve got a little bit of a conundrum about having to explain it. If you’re too good at explaining it, there’s something slightly wrong there.”

The Art of Pretending to Swim is out now. Villagers play Other Voices in Ballina this weekend; and the Metropolis Festival in Dublin on Oct 27