Villagers - Becoming A Jackal

From the very start, you know you're in serious company. Whether you've been sitting patiently in Ireland waiting for this album since the very first Villagers gig some 18 months ago, were introduced to Conor O'Brien when the young Dubliner enjoyed his Bon Iver moment on Jools Holland last month or are coming to Becoming A Jackal completely cold, you can't help but be impressed straight from the off. It's where distant tambourines and barely audible organs make way for shimmering violins. Where they are all in turn pushed to the background by the most haunting of piano lines and then the voice. That enunciating-every-single-word, confident delivery of O'Brien's. In fact it's all Conor O'Brien - who, on record at least, is Villagers, playing pretty much every single note of every single instrument. He gets through a lot of them on 'I Saw The Dead', the opening song on this, his debut record. It's a pretty staggering start to an album that - for anyone who has caught a whiff of O'Brien's post-Immediate work - is unsurprisingly staggering throughout.

Your favourite albums all have 'moments'. It could be a line sung a certain way or an instrument introduced at a perfectly arranged time, their only requirement is that they hit you just as hard on the 84th listen as the first. Becoming A Jackal is littered with them. There's minor ones like the throwaway piano tinkle at the end of the otherwise juggernaut penultimate track 'Pieces' or the abrupt door slamming that ends the aforementioned 'I Saw The Dead'. There's slightly more immediate examples like O'Brien's American Warewolf In London impression when he launches into the most impressive of howls - that'd be 'Pieces' again - and when live favourite 'Ship Of Promises' proves to be just as spine-tinglingly rumbustious on record. The songs in their entirety aren't bad either! 'Pieces' is so powerful that it make closing track, 'To Be Counted Among Men' - itself one of the album's brightest moments - seem like a bonus track tacked on the end. Becoming A Jackal's penultimate track - and in case you haven't guessed, probably its strongest - just leaves you utterly reeling. 

But then so does most of the album. It's an extremely skilled and complexly stitched together piece of work. With the exception of the jaunty, slightly out-of-place 'The Pact (I'll Be Your Fever), O'Brien doesn't put a foot wrong. When he's not leaving you breathless ('Ship Of Promises', 'Pieces') or still stopping you dead in your tracks with songs you first heard over a year ago, ('Meaning Of The Ritual', 'Twenty-Seven Strangers'), he's impressing with lyrics that are engaging, richly detailed and stirring. The stop-a-good-thing-before-it-even-mildly-fades 'Set The Tigers Free' is a startlingly obvious example. To Villagers newbies or Jools Holland converts, Becoming A Jackal will likely be deemed a remarkable debut while those of us who have been waiting patiently can simply add that it's a predictably remarkable one. What's all the more scarily predictable though is that O'Brien, one of those rare complete masters of his craft, probably still has his masterpiece to come.