Villagers – The Art of Pretending to Swim (Deluxe Edition) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 57:21 minutes | 621 MB | Genre: Indie Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Domino Recording Co
Like wine, music improves with age. And Conor O’Brien’s matures well. From the Malahide coast, where the Irishman composed his first three albums on his farm, to the hubbub of Dublin, the villager has changed his scene. Much like his album. After Becoming a Jackal, Awayland and Darling Arythmetic, three soft pop-folk albums, the songwriter with ice-cube eyes has released The Art Of Pretenting To Swim. O’Brien has read the Pro Tools manual for a shorter album length (44 minutes) and much more elaborate detail. We find simple poems (A Trick Of The Light) where the Irishman sings “We are the dawn, we carry the sun”, while he tells of the conflict between blinding faith and mathematical reason on Ada. With his string arrangements (Ada) which are more reminiscent of The Clientele than Damien Rice, beautiful electro (Real Go-Getter), soul (Long Time Waiting), brass (Love Came With All That It Brings), soft synths (Sweet Saviour) and a warming voice, the opus is addictive and unpretentious. – Charlotte Saintoin
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Villagers – Fever Dreams (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 45:23 minutes | 527 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Domino Recording Co
Conor O’Brien presents Villagers’ fifth studio album ‘Fever Dreams’. Escapism is a very necessary pursuit right now, and ‘Fever Dreams’ follows it to mesmerising effect. It works like all the best records – it becomes a mode of transport; it picks you up from where you are and sets you down elsewhere. Written over the course of two years, the main bodies of the songs were recorded in a series of full-band studio sessions in late 2019 and early 2020. Over the course of the long, slow pandemic days, O’Brien refined them in his tiny home studio in Dublin, and the album was then mixed by David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx, FKA Twigs). O’Brien says on the gestation of ‘Fever Dreams’: ‘I had an urge to write something that was as generous to the listener as it was to myself. Sometimes the most delirious states can produce the most ecstatic, euphoric and escapist dreams’.
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Villagers – Fever Dreams (Deluxe Edition) (2021/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 54:35 minutes | 586 MB | Genre: Indie Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Domino Recording Co
At the end of last year, Villagers released their excellent fifth album Fever Dreams; a paean to human connection, the transporting and hypnotic recordhit the Top 20 in the UK charts and garnered praise from across the board. Villagers’ Conor O’Brien saw Fever Dreams as a way of bringing the real and the surreal together: “I had an urge to write something that was as generous to the listener as it was to myself,” he says. “Sometimes the most delirious states can produce the most ecstatic, euphoric and escapist dreams.”
Today, Villagers are pleased to announce a digital-only deluxe edition of Fever Dreams which will feature three beautiful and intimate acoustic versions of the singles “The First Day”, “So Simpatico” and “Circles In The Firing Line”.
O’Brien was joined by Kevin Corcoran on keys for the performances and this is the first time these tracks are available digitally.
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