Villagers, Darling Arithmetic - album review: The sums add up on a sweet, pure and elegant return

O’Brien remains painfully self-aware, the polar opposite of an unexamined life

Singer-songwriter Villagers (Andrew Whitton)

Following his surprising shift on 2013’s {Awayland} into a groove-based soundscape informed by electronica and krautrock, Darling Arithmetic marks a reversion to Conor O’Brien’s troubadour style.

Apparently influenced by the neo-realist purity of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, O’Brien has opted for a position of sometimes painfully naked honesty in these nine songs, and accordingly pared back the arrangements to simple, direct guitar settings tinted with subtle shades of piano, organ and mellotron, and driven along by the most spartan of beats.

It’s an apposite strategy for a song-cycle on which the confessional tone focuses less on events than emotions: rather than recounting narratives, O’Brien cuts into philosophical territory, acknowledging his agency in the songs’ darker shadows. “Got these little walls, couldn’t break them if I tried,” he claims in “Everything I Am Is Yours”, as if setting a potential lover up for disappointment.

But then he’s scared when deeper intimacy looms: “Left my demons at the door/ So what you opening it for?” Relationships, he realises in “Hot Scary Summer”, are the kind of hard work that makes one “half a person, half a monster”, especially when “all the pretty young homophobes [are] out looking for a fight”. But rising above hatred brings its own reward, judging by the jaunty “Little Bigot”.

But whether tackling prejudice, musing on existential imperatives in “Courage”, or taking a shoreline stroll in “The Soul Serene”, O’Brien remains painfully self-aware, the polar opposite of an unexamined life, sustained by “the sweet relief of knowing nothing comes for free”. Inevitably, it leaves him mired in frustration by the closing “So Naive”, trapped by the realisation that the thing he most desires will remain out of his reach. But doesn’t that summarise the condition of being human, generally? It’s an elegant, thoughtful album, rendered in deft, subtle brushstrokes.