Darling Arithmetic, Conor O’Brien’s third album as Villagers, is a hushed and sensitive thing. Recorded at home, it’s sparse in its textures, earnest and confidential in its soul-searching. Nothing about the Barbican hall – built for orchestras, with a well-upholstered, corporate atmosphere – lends itself to this kind of intimacy; attempts to convey homeliness on stage, with a standing lamp beside the keyboards and a faded rug on the floor, mostly emphasise the unnecessary space yawning around the five-piece band.
What the venue does have going for it is pin-sharp acoustics: so clear, you could shut your eyes and believe that O’Brien croons to you alone.
He plays every song from Darling Arithmetic and the sound and the deep-from-the-heart words leave him nowhere to hide. No wonder the first few songs come across as timid, Dawning on Me pretty but polite, So Naive meandering until the backing band stop tethering themselves to long, low, whining notes and unleash energy and boldness. The exposure is particularly unforgiving in No One to Blame, exaggerating its hints of self-pity; yet O’Brien sings it with such kindness, shrouded in a golden haze of harp and double bass, that what communicates overwhelmingly is sincerity.
That niceness, the relaxed pace, the pattering loveliness of the music, could be frustrating were it not punctuated with something more fiery. On Little Bigot, drums are hammered and the guitar thrums bluntly as O’Brien calls time on prejudice and homophobia; on The Waves, from Awayland, those drums become dense, an undertow that carries the mood in and out of hopefulness. Becoming a Jackal, one of the earliest songs O’Brien plays, untethers itself from rhythm to become jagged and raw.
There was a time when Villagers performed entire gigs that way; if this is less dynamic, it’s also more of a tender embrace.
