AEM112 Villagers

Vil­lagers’ Conor J. O’Brien will prob­a­bly draw a lot of com­par­isons to another well-known singer-songwriter named Conor (doesn’t hurt that he looks a bit like him too), but where Oberst’s music, at least in its prime, was all about cathar­sis and aban­don and wild gen­er­al­iza­tions and accu­sa­tions that feel really good to yell (no mat­ter how uncool or over-the-top or not-really-true they may be), O’Brien’s is oblique and care­ful. Sub­tle, even. His lyrics slip eas­ily from first to sec­ond to third per­son, and even the first per­son songs seem some­how dis­tanced, eas­ier to hear as a nar­ra­tive device than a soul-bearing, this-is-the-deeply-buried-truth-about-Conor-J-O’Brien kind of thing. In fact, O’Brien is more inter­ested in the elu­sive nature of truth than in any grandiose, white­washed state­ments. In the quiet, brood­ing, sleigh-bell touched “The Mean­ing of the Rit­ual” (the gor­geous, del­i­cate home-made ani­ma­tion for which (link) is 100% worth your time and hap­pens to be one of the only videos I’ve ever seen that made a song clearer and more pow­er­ful instead of just dis­tract­ing me from it), he sings: my love is self­ish and I bet yours is too / what is this pecu­liar word called ‘truth’. And again, in Ampeater A-side “Becom­ing A Jackal”: before you take this song as truth / you should won­der what I’m tak­ing from you. This fix­a­tion on the muta­bil­ity of things dom­i­nates O’Brien’s lyrics, and actu­ally makes him more of an inverse-Oberst. Rather than shout­ing the capital-letter Truth, he’s explor­ing the mul­ti­tude of truths. The songs are quite deci­sive, but I have no idea what I am doing, or where I am going, he says in his absur­dist press bio, and though some of it may be a faux-naïf pose (Once the songs took shape, I asked some friends of mine to help me play them to peo­ple. When they kindly agreed, I decided that we would present our­selves as ‘Vil­lagers’ – I don’t really know why.), as con­trived as any other pub­lic­ity stance (PR is inescapably fake; even direct­ness becomes a medi­ated game of authen­tic­ity), it’s still rather refresh­ing to hear some­one say that songs should always be treated with humor, no mat­ter the sub­ject mat­ter, or that his goal in song­writ­ing is to sur­prise him­self. Right on, Conor.

The arrange­ments in Vil­lagers’ songs are equally sub­tle and del­i­cate, choos­ing the inti­mate ges­ture over the grand flour­ish so as to keep the dra­matic ele­ment of the music sub­dued. O’Brien’s voice burns with a gen­tle heat, and you’re more likely to encounter gen­tle piano-guitar or guitar-bass unisons than washes of strings or boom­ing brass (though there are touches of strings and french horn on other tracks of Becom­ing A Jackal, the band’s Domino LP).  O’Brien has a knack for writ­ing songs that would be per­fectly solid acoustic trou­ba­dour pieces and then adding just one more sec­tion that man­ages to bring out the the shape of the whole song the way ice brings scars to the sur­face of your skin.

On “Becom­ing a Jackal”, a rolling 6/4 tune that man­ages to seem cir­cu­lar and wind­ing in form with­out really depart­ing much from con­ven­tion, this takes the form of the sec­tion that begins when I got older. It’s a sec­tion that man­ages to advance both the musi­cal ten­sion of the song and the nar­ra­tive arc of the lyrics all at once. Finally we get the har­mony vocals the song has been hint­ing at the whole time (with the dou­bling of key lines like that first always rearranged; the fact that the cho­rus is sung, dou­bled, at dif­fer­ent places in the stereo spec­trum from the verses; and the one tan­ta­liz­ing har­mo­nized line in the sec­ond chorus).

At the same time, the story leaps for­ward. All along the nar­ra­tor has been day­dream­ing at the win­dow, both cared for and impris­oned by the song’s you, who in turn is abused by the jack­als. Here he finally escapes into the streets, lit­er­ally fol­low­ing his dream, and learns a new way to move from those jack­als. The mean­ing of the song is elu­sive, as it should be, but it seems to have at its core a para­dox: the need to betray some­thing (alter­na­tively: some­one) you once loved in order to grow. It could be any­thing from rebelling against your par­ents to “sell­ing out” as a musi­cian, though in this case the next set of lyrics, set against a series of rhythm sec­tion breaks that make them stand out like noth­ing else in the song, implies the lat­ter. O’Brien is lit­er­ally sell­ing us his fears in the form of songs, but the fact that he knows this and does it any­way gives the line an inverted mean­ing: releas­ing songs about how untrust­wor­thy songs are is an act that has to mean he has weighed it out and decided that there is still some­thing impor­tant and mean­ing­ful that can be con­veyed in a song. Once again: right on.

B-side “Twenty Seven Strangers” is more oblique yet, a story of tak­ing a city bus home that simul­ta­ne­ously begs and shrugs off inter­pre­ta­tions, but seems to revolve around the anonymity and con­fu­sion and pow­er­less­ness of city life (any­time any­one sings the phrase flu­o­res­cent light you can bet this is what they’re get­ting at: noth­ing says urban dehu­man­iza­tion like flu­o­res­cent lights). The musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment is sparse, resigned and melan­choly in a lovely way, just like rid­ing home with exhausted com­muters in the lighted rec­tan­gle of the evening bus. Through­out, reverby word­less vocal melodies, fin­ger­picked acoustic gui­tar and min­i­mal drums pro­vide the back­drop for O’Brien’s pre­cise and even lead vocals. Not one thing changes musi­cally in the song until 2:19, when that moment of liftoff arrives (an arrang­ing trick that forces you to really focus on the lyrics up to that point, and also reflects the end­less rep­e­ti­tion hinted at in those lyrics), just as it does in “Becom­ing a Jackal”. The har­mony vocals and bass finally arrive to fill out the song for the last few lines before a new word­less vocal-piano melody arrives, ris­ing through the crash­ing cym­bals on the first three notes as if it might tran­scend the song, but then sink­ing back down in beat-down resignation.

The very end of “Twenty Seven Strangers” is in fact my favorite moment in the entire 7”. The orig­i­nal melody reap­pears twice. The first time it’s sus­pended over the full band and drenched in reverb just as it was at the songs start. The sec­ond repeat is pared down to just O’Brien’s voice and gui­tar, the same two instru­ments with which the song began, only this time his voice is up close, stripped of the dis­tanc­ing effects that hid its tex­ture and flaws. We lis­ten to his voice hold the final, gen­tle falsetto note and then crackle and sput­ter out like a gut­ter­ing can­dle, the sound of the anony­mous soul step­ping off that city bus.

Gabe Birn­baum

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