Following up on their brilliant 2013 album Awayland, Villager’s will be returning this year with their third record release, Darling Arithmetic. The Irish indie folk five piece have been beavering away in the background following a year a so of touring on the back of their last output and from the sound of the first single release, Courage, it’s shaping up to be a darker, quieter sound, compared to the more rapturous qualities of Awayland.
Set for release on CD, vinyl and digital download on the 13th April 2015 in the UK and on the 14th in the US with a pretty sizeable European tour in the offing around the same time. In addition to a number of gigs in their home city of Dublin, and the mandatory Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam stop offs, Villagers will be playing at venues in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow for the UK leg of the tour. You can see full details for all of the tour dates in the poster below.
You can also take a listen to the first track from Darling Arithmetic with the YouTube music video below. The track is also available already as a digital download if you can’t wait for the full record release. We were pretty big fans of everything on Awayland, so we had pretty high expectations for more of the same on the new album. However, Courage feels a long way away from the sonic powerhouse that defines Passing A Message, Nothing Arrived and The Waves, three of the best tracks from the last album, like the vestiges of positive introspection and musical experimentation have been stripped back to leave something that a little less inspired and more depressed.
Admittedly, Courage is just one of the nine tracks on the record, if you exclude the two bonus songs on the deluxe version, so it’s possible that there’s a lot more to come from the band before the April release date. Hopefully, it’s just one element of the overarching musical style of Darling Arithmetic, and that the psych influences and pace variation hasn’t been lost completely, but if the song ends up defining the album in its entirety, it’s going to be a step down for us after such a promising second studio album.
It’s got a maudlin quality that doesn’t fade in any real way as the song develops. There’s also a clip clop simplicity to the acoustic guitar rhythm that makes up the lion’s share of the music on Courage, which does little to rekindle the magic of Awayland. Conor O’Brien’s vocal’s are as rich and textured as ever, but the song doesn’t really give him a platform to swell in, so things just amble on without really getting up to any kind of significant impact, irrespective of the rising and ringing string overlay that builds out over the ending.
While it’s not a bad start to the album, with a nice organ backdrop, it does leave us with the hope that it’s about as relaxed and slouchy as Darling Arithmetic gets when it arrives in April. However, the reality is that with Villagers there’s bound to be least some nuggets of brilliance in and amongst it all, no matter what.
Share Villagers Darling Arithmetic album release details with:
Courage music video:
Villagers 2015 tour dates poster:
