Villagers: Awayland

In the past, calling

Villagers a band has been a misnomer: From its inception, it's been little more than an alias for

Conor O'Brien, a singer-songwriter from Dublin with a flair for the dramatic and a gift for creating rich arrangements out of instruments he's played himself. Villagers' 2010 debut, Becoming a Jackal, was recorded almost entirely by O'Brien; it sets his unpredictable narratives to pretty arrangements with sturdy and simple melodies at their core. Becoming a Jackal is a marvelous record, but it's easy to reconfigure its songs to suit a standard guy-with-guitar configuration.

For a follow-up, O'Brien looked outside himself to craft {Awayland}, an idiosyncratic and surprising collection of songs that aren't so simple, in part because the singer recruited outside collaborators and listened to their ideas. The result is a mix of thoughtful approachability ("My Lighthouse") and an assortment of trips down more surprising side roads. A stormy epic, "The Waves" billows out majestically, while "Earthly Pleasure" packs roughly eight minutes worth of song - murder, intrigue, the devil, an array of human failings - into a tidy four-minute package.

At its best, as in the marvelous single "Nothing Arrived," {Awayland} mixes the two approaches: An anthem about low expectations - "I waited for something / and something died," he sings, adding, "So I waited for nothing / and nothing arrived" - the song packs big ideas into a gently rollicking, peppily digestible nugget. It embodies O'Brien's considerable gift for songs that almost always turn something on its head.

-Stephen Thompson

Track List:

01. My Lighthouse

02. Earthly Pleasure

03. The Waves

04. Judgment Call

05. Nothing Arrived

06. The Bell

07. {Awayland}

08. Passing A Message

09. Grateful Song

10. In A Newfound Land You Are Free

11. Rhythm Composer

Photo by Rich Gilligan