Caught Live: Villagers @ The Workman's Club, Dublin

One of the best things about fan shows – apart from being able to boast about having been there to anyone who’ll listen the next day – is that the bothersome drunks that tend to ruin gigs with their incessant chatter are usually notable by their absence. Perhaps with this in mind, Conor O’Brien has tonight given his fellow Villagers (bar keyboardist Cormac Curran, who provides occasional accompaniment) the night off, and takes to the stage of Dublin’s newest venue with just his battered acoustic in tow.

By any standards it’s been quite the year for O’Brien: in the past fortnight alone he’s attended the Mercury Music Prize awards ceremony as a hotly-tipped nominee just a few days after playing to the largest crowd of his career to date under the big top at Electric Picnic. Tonight’s invite-only gathering is alarmingly intimate by comparison, but provides the type of Village hall setting to which O’Brien’s dark confessional songwriting is arguably best suited.

As the sparse a capella intro to non-album track ‘Cecelia And Her Selfhood’ kicks things off, it’s a good thing that there are no chatterers in attendance; singer-songwriters may get their fair share of stick for their relentless angst-peddling, but when it’s delivered with the kind of intensity O’Brien displays tonight it really can be powerful stuff. Much like his Becoming A Jackal debut that caught the attention of those Mercury judges, tonight’s show takes a little while to get fully warmed up; but by the time crowd favourites like ‘Twenty-Seven Strangers’ and ‘To Be Counted Among Men’ are unleashed, the vast majority of us are singing along to nearly every word. It’s clear that it’s not only O’Brien’s stock that has risen in the past twelve to eighteen months; his onstage persona is now assured where once it was fragile, and tonight he eyeballs the front few rows at all the right times. Songs like the Josh Rouse-esque ‘Set The Tigers Free’ (“I hope you feel the same way when it’s your turn to disappear / I’ll be cheering from the sidelines with a sandwich and a beer”) are little short of spine-tingling when encountered at such close proximity.

After treating us to an impressive – and suitably cryptic – new number called ‘In A New Found Land You Are Free’, O’Brien really goes for it with ‘Pieces’, a song that sounds even more cathartic in tonight’s stripped-back setting. Perhaps appropriately, the set is rounded off with ‘Home’, the chorus of which provokes a mass singalong that must have sounded great on the radio (the gig was being broadcast live on Today FM’s Paul McLoone Show). Things are then brought full-circle by a falsetto-infused encore of early 7” track ‘On A Sunlit Stage’ that nods towards the backwoods isolation of Justin Vernon.

“I’ve got the next two days off…” beams a tired-but-happy O’Brien at one point in-between songs tonight. With a gruelling schedule that will take him and his band all across Europe and North America between now and the end of 2010, it’s safe to say there aren’t many inside The Workman’s Club who’d begrudge him this luxury.