New Album Review: Villagers – {Awayland}

Freddie Matthews writes from London: Dublin’s Villagers have been on the music scene since about 2008 and unless you’re from the other side of the Irish Sea then it’s unlikely you’ll have heard of them.

I recently read a review about Villagers where the writer, who shall remain nameless, said some bollocks about forgetting the rest of the band because Villagers are all about one man and one man only and that’s Conor O’Brien. I couldn’t disagree more. A singer without their band is just one person alone, better known as a solo artist. Whether the band used is his former backing band or not, being a member of a band requires a big commitment and that’s just at fun level. Making a living as a semi-pro or even fully professional is entirely different. Villagers only sound as they do because all 5 members come together as one cohesive unit, producing the perfect balance for each individual song from each musician, creating the overall sound and subsequently this brand new album: {Awayland}.

I don’t care what anyone anywhere says, a band will never be just one person. These things take time to shape, mould, nurture and nail down before exposing all that raw talent to the world in the form of recorded performance. Even Morrissey may have been the front man with The Smiths but they were always a band until he left to pursue his solo career etc, etc, etc.

Villagers are no strangers to the music circuit. They’ve toured Europe supporting Tracey Chapman. They’ve performed at a number of festivals including Oxegen, Latitude, Electric Picnic, Meltdown, Eurosonic and Leeds/Reading. They have even played on Jools Holland’s Later…! Villagers know their stuff and {Awayland} is the follow up to their Mercury-nominated debut album, which is a daunting task by anyone’s standards.

{Awayland} is a completely different entity from their Becoming A Jackal debut album, from May 2010. During 2 years of touring O’Brien struggled for creative direction, or at least a direction he felt was a progression for Villagers. The result was a complete upheaval of everything he previously thought he knew, as epic as a tectonic plate movement. Villagers started to explore electronica and soundscapes.

Despite the first song on {Awayland}, My Lighthouse, sounding ever so slightly more laid back and Bon Iveresque, there is an epic soundscape and direction to this brand new album. Earthly Pleasure reminds me of the Maximo Park album Our Earthly Pleasures (there are no musical similarities here). It has a cracker of a chorus while O’Brien’s vocal remains controlled yet emotional on every level and this song builds to a cinematic crescendo. The Waves is our first taste of the newly found electronic Villagers sound, a sparse almost Morse Code beginning makes way for compressed distorted guitar head nodding thrash out of an ending.

Other standout tracks include: Judgement Call, spellbinding in the performance is a musical work of art; Nothing Arrived moves away from the electronica and back to Villagers sounding like Embrace; {Awayland} is a soundscape; In A Newfound Land You Are Free is simple and sensitive, the heavy breather on the album.

There are times when Villagers remind me of Doves, Embrace or Bright Eyes but it just works and makes me think they’ve been doing this for decades.

The beauty of Villagers is not just whom they also sound like but the uniquely authentic poetic charm they possess despite their constant critical comparisons.

I guarantee you that {Awayland} will surprise you.

7/10

–End–