Secret Meeting score: 83
by Dave Bertram
As the intense finger-picked acoustic draws through the opening bars of Again, lovers of earlier albums, Becoming a Jackal and Darling Arithmetic, will find themselves at home. But where the previous records offered soft folk introspection, The Art of Pretending to Swim – Conor O’Brien’s fourth under the Villagers moniker – is more soulful and full bodied.
The folk approach for which he’s become synonymous with has really taken a backseat here. While Sweet Saviour delivers the familiar dose of acoustic-led pop, the songwriting as a whole has drifted down a deeper and more compounded road. In the groove-laden delivery, falsetto harmonies, high-pitched strings, chord changes, more eclectic instrumentation and more space in between the lines, there’s a soul music obsession coming out of the shadows.
Each track has been constructed through a soulful lens, with hints of Marvin Gay, Bill Withers and more contemporary artists like Matt Corby, which – when pegged under O’Brien’s eerie lyrics – create something diverse and altogether new.
This is particularly palpable on single A Trick of the Light¸ where a stark contradiction surfaces between the uplifting rhythms and instrumentation and O’Brien’s trademark love, loss and disillusionment – “there’s an ocean in my body/and there’s a river in my soul/and I’m crying”.
Long Time Waiting manages to turn a questioning of the second coming into a groove peppered with wild electronic squawks, while Fool is a bouncy pop delight filled with beautiful noise and couplets of confusion, which explodes into a stirring, climactic chorus as he sings – ‘here is my bleeding heart, will you be my falling star, will you take the pain away.’
There’s subtlety too. Sweet Saviour builds slowly, blending soft organ keys and gently strummed acoustics, while the soft vocal on Hold Me Down simmers under cooed harmonies before a flock of violins arrive to provide an upward shift in direction.
The art of building an eclectic and dense mix of instrumentation and arrangement around the consistent themes of love and loss is realised brilliantly here. The Art of Pretending to Swim is O’Brien’s most assured and daring album yet, and there would be no surprises to see another Ivor Novello award on the mantlepiece come next May.
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