Previously known for two Mercury-nominated albums that began as indie folk and expanded to an orchestral band set-up, Villagers – that’s Dubliner Conor O’Brien – has made an album of intimate love-gone-wrong songs. With acoustic guitars, piano and bruised croons, there’s now not a lot separating the previously quirky O’Brien from more quotidian star-crossed singers, less Bright Eyes, you could say, and more Damien Rice. A few more like the angry Little Bigot (“Take that hatred and throw it on the fire,” it goes, over a three-legged rhythm) or the minor-key plucked swing of So Naive and Darling Arithmetic would add up to more than just another record in which devastation is mourned too mellifluously.
