Darling Arithmetic
Villagers
Domino
Conor O’Brien, the discerning Irish singer-songwriter behind Villagers, began his career in a shroud of complicated solitude. The debut Villagers album — Becoming a Jackal, released on Domino in 2010 — was an impressively layered production in which he played almost all the parts, singing about appearances and perception. His 2013 follow-up, Awayland, featured a proper crew of musicians, a stronger rhythmic push, and a more guarded eloquence. “It takes loss to be free,” he sang on one track, with certainty.
For the third Villagers album, Darling Arithmetic, O’Brien has scaled back radically, turning out something that resembles an old-fashioned folk-rock confessional. On the opener and lead single, Courage, he strums an acoustic guitar with a country lilt that calls Neil Young’s Harvest to mind. “I took a little time to be honest,” he sings gently in the first verse. “I took a little time to be me.”
If that sounds almost like an apology, O’Brien has his reasons. Darling Arithmetic isn’t just an album about falling in and out of love; it’s also an announcement of his identity as a gay man. That detail is at once incidental and central to the songs therein.
Directness has never really been O’Brien’s style; not musically, not emotionally. So the startling turn here is his move toward transparency. On a song titled Little Bigot, he addresses would-be antagonists with a disarming empathy. In a related vein, Hot Scary Summer finds him rehashing old territory with an ex:
Remember kissing in the cobblestones
In the heat of the night
And all the pretty young homophobes
Lookin’ out for a fight.
O’Brien made Darling Arithmetic completely on his own, and he’s savvy enough to understand how its bedroom scale plays up the vulnerabilities in his small, clear voice. But while the album is willfully interior and musically conservative, it doesn’t ever feel cloistered, because of the emotional stakes that he keeps clearly in sight.
On Everything I Am Is Yours, O’Brien interrogates his own desires, finding resolution only in a vow of constancy. “Got these little walls; I couldn’t break them if I tried,” he sings. “But I promise I’ll be true.” However else progress can be measured, surely this counts, for now.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Second Hand Heart
Dwight Yoakam
Reprise
Dwight Yoakam is a high-concept classicist. He inhabits an era and geography all his own, a remembered 1960s California where Buck Owens and the Byrds somehow reigned together in harmony. It’s a place and time where a songwriter’s job — forged from exemplars like Hank Williams and Carl Perkins, polished by the British Invasion and California pop and honed by the impatience of punk — was to capture the deepest emotions in the fewest words, preferably monosyllables. In the title track of his new album, Second Hand Heart, Yoakam sings about new romance after bitter experience: “Pick up all those small hopes back off the ground/’Cause after years of tears it’s hard to say what’s up or down/So if you will I’ll try to start/And take the chance that we might fall apart.”
The album is a reckoning with grown-up love, a battle against disillusionment and a big brash stomp. It was produced by Yoakam with his road band for backup; they did some recording sessions between arena shows opening for the country hitmaker Eric Church. Even the ballads are pugnacious, buttressed by the band’s three-guitar lineup, while Yoakam’s voice flaunts its rural drawl and holler, breaking into a near-yodel or a rockabilly whoop every chance he gets.
There are scars and misgivings behind the musical assurance. Brisk strumming, a galloping drumbeat, pealing lead guitar and, all of a sudden, a swoop of Beach Boys-like falsetto promise hope as Yoakam sings, “Your tortured heart’s soft anguished pleas/rescued by love shall be set free” — but, as the song’s title points out, that’s In Another World, not this one. And the beefed-up rockabilly of Liar, with some of Yoakam’s most exuberant screams, shouts back at duplicity.
Yoakam has been releasing albums since 1986, and he was a country hitmaker in the 1980s and 1990s, selling millions of albums, before radio tastes changed. Now he jokes in the Elvis Presley-tinged The Big Time that “I ain’t never seen the big time,” but he’s happy just to be “a-sittin’ on the front porch” watching his partner do the laundry. But the album says otherwise: He’s still pushing, still sure of what makes a song alive and durable.
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Crown
The-Dream
Contra Paris/Capitol
More than any R&B singer or songwriter working today, The-Dream knows that the better part of seduction is vulnerability. In his world, humbling yourself gets the prize. It may also explain why when he writes songs for others, like Beyonce or Rihanna, he paints those women as conquering heroes, impervious to anything so trifling as male bravado.
On Crown, his new EP, The-Dream is a happy underdog right from the start. The opening song, Prime, is a swampy digital soul number; he sings in a voice that connotes weakness, but not desperation. “Do you believe in me like I believe in you?” he asks, and not rhetorically. His target is a sunbeam; he’s just a mortal. “I know you think you’re out of my league,” he tells her, trying to disarm her with flattery, then continues, “but I’m trying to tell you, girl/I’m in my prime.”
Though he’s an often astounding songwriter, The-Dream doesn’t have the carnality of Trey Songz or the athleticism of Usher or Chris Brown; he’s a singer who benefits from all the gifts that modern recording technology has to offer. But like the competition, he’s capable of bluster. On the EP’s first single, the full title of which can’t be published, he sounds like Ralph Tresvant, cooing not at a woman, but at the man whose trust she’s violating: “She don’t love you, ‘cause if she did/She wouldn’t be all on my phone right now.” And on Cedes Benz, he’s rapping like the lost fourth member of Travis Porter.
For someone who has made tenderness so central — see All I Need, on which he melts into a viscous sea of synthesizers and harmony vocals — The-Dream has been haunted by real-life friction. Last year, he was arrested on charges of assaulting his pregnant ex-girlfriend. (He has denied the accusation.)
Crownis the first of two EPs planned for release this year; the second will be Jewel, which The-Dream has said will be more reflective of his songwriter side. Perhaps he hopes that singing those words himself might cleanse him.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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