It seems the music listening public and Conor O’ Brien may have got off on the wrong foot.
The man who fronts Villagers has had plenty of time to come to terms with his legacy, having released their debut Becoming A Jackal over a decade ago and since then being nominated for a shelf full of industry awards, including a Mercury Prize and an Ivor Novello. That’s a whole lot to process.
The time has certainly been a healer: O’Brien has recently faced up to the baggage that came with those early records, of the way he was using them as vehicles to evoke a sense of self-effacement and uniqueness about his situation. Those days, the Dubliner now says, whatever critical euphoria they saw, are now firmly behind him.
His and the band’s sixth album, Fever Dreams, came via a disjointed process, the tracks initially recorded in a makeshift studio as a collective before lockdown meant that the singer was thrust into the world of remote working and living with a body of work like it was sharing the bathroom.
Living in such solitary close confinement meant – perhaps naturally – losing his mind a little, but whatever claustrophobic alchemy did, the outcome is a revelation, a beatific concoction of moods held together by an occasionally tremulous voice but presented with honesty and empathetic warmth.
If you’re wondering what that sounds like, opener Something Bigger has the perfect dimensions to illustrate. Starting with a hungover sounding wooze and distorted, lo-fi vocals, as the kick-off to a record it promises…not much.
When The First Day follows it and begins in a similar vein the temptation to hit skip is almost irresistible, until after thirty seconds or so it transforms into one of the year’s finest pop songs, melody overflowing, easy soul in yards of yards without retreat.
As that and the title would suggest, there’s much talk of dreams, but not of them as a past time, more as gateways between one state of mind to another.
Song In Seven – about midnight skinny dipping and then looking up skywards towards the stars – uses spectral brass, delay and reverb to bring back the out-of-bodyness of the experience, the sparkle and wonder folding back a curtain of memories.
Sometimes feet land back on terra firma. One example of this must-come-down is Circles In The Firing Line, an examination of how the perma-adversarial world of modern discourse – ‘the united state of demagogic logic’ – shoots its toxins straight into society’s veins.
Even then there’s a sting in the tail, as what could’ve passed for something of Zach Condon’s ilk ends up turning itself inside out in a messy conclusion with half a dozen voices raised up chanting, ‘You’re fucking up my favourite dream!’.
Totally in (sort of) character – aside from the gorgeous, soon to be Radio 2-conquering Momentarily – this is the end of the fireworks, as if darkness has fallen and the moon has gone out.
In this twilight the title-track has a weirdly through-the-looking-glass air to it, the strings and keyboards somehow pinched and degraded, whilst closer Deep In My Heart is a sparkling, reluctant lullaby.
If this is an apology to those who found his earlier work too self-indulgent, it’s one of incredible confidence, music to be retold, re-broadcast and reinterpreted a hundred times over before it’s done with us.
Life affirming and charming-strange, Fever Dreams is Villagers finally opening their hearts to everyone.
