2018 marks ten years since the nativity of Villagers. Three studio albums accept earned Conor O'Brien a Choice Music Prize win and an Ivor Novello award and widespread admiration in that time. In the very loose hierarchy of success and influence in the Irish music scene, O'Brien is up nearly the top.

The fourth studio album The Art Of Pretending To Swim is an affidavit of the songwriter's talent while providing evidence of a leap in sonic progress. The acoustic folk of and straightforward songwriter arrangments on Darling Arithmetic do not return.

O'Brien wrote, recorded and produced the album in his Dublin studio and there'southward a sense of a new chapter. He sets out that stall with the get-go track 'Once again' straddling O'Brien'due south signature folk sound with the sort of underlying textured electronic artful that features an android-like vocal sample, and some subtle effective synthesizers and product nous that reinforces the track's cadre message – of self-renewal and the process of first that feels quietly giddy with hope. The repeating robotic hook contrasts starkly against O'Brien's expressive song performance.

O'Brien isn't afraid to expose himself in his lyrics, dating all the fashion back to the uncomfortable confessional in 'Becoming A Jackal', but this album showcases a directness in his phrasing, an obvious sea change in the way the artist presents himself and his thought process.

Take 'Fool', every bit self-reflexive equally it is tragic. A genuine statement of vulnerability among a screen-washed ocean of sardonic observations. "And for at present I go on my caput down / But one day I volition precede / My reputation". 'Fool', like much of the material on The Art Of Pretending To Swim is actually greatly sorry, just becoming more than then with repeated listens and closer observations.

The song's span of "So hither is my bleeding heart / Will you lot be my falling star? / Will yous take the pain abroad?" strikes as a dramatic and desperate endeavour to go someone's attending while they're distracted by engineering science, reinforced past the Bob Gallagher video in which O'Brien literally offers united states of america his freshly plucked heart.

As much as these to-the-point lyrics work so well in tandem with the themes and artful of this new LP, there's still a function of me that misses the poetic and detailed penmanship of previous Villagers albums.

At it'south rare worst, some of the messaging on The Art Of Pretending To Swim plays a niggling like sloganeering, even the chorus of 'A Trick Of The Light', as much as it is a superb melody, is guilty of that.

How proficient is 'Ada' as an album closer? Sprawled out over a full six minutes, progressive and understated in one half and blistering in the other, it's a song almost the English mathematician and computing visionary Ada Lovelace. Wistful lines like "Ada did y'all know? / that you are the hole in which I hide" rise out of the mix similar steam out of the water, floating perpetually upwards. That transition into white noise and glitchy drums is a standout moment and is amid some of the best production I've heard this year. The deluxe version of the album offers an extended and expanded version with extra collaborators drawn from the Irish scene like Lisa Hannigan, I Take A Tribe, Stephen James Smith, Jape, Cian Nugent, Maria Sommerville, Saint Sister and those farther afield similar The Staves and John Grant.

'Beloved Came With All That Information technology Brings' is the album's nearly individual all-effectually rail. The vocal manipulation is oddly unnerving, totally at odds with the lo-fi hip-hop pulsate loop, which gives this otherwise dour song a stiff sense of groove and rhythm. O'Brien's vocal delivery on the chorus is among his finest on whatever of the Villager'southward recorded material, completely heartbreaking.

The first couple of Villagers LPs had an unshakable otherworldliness about their lyrics. As if they were written by someone who hadn't quite accustomed the rules and conditions of modernistic society (retrieve of a runway like 'To Exist Counted Among Men' to understand). For all it'southward sharp eco-activist undertones and historical sensation, it doesn't quite fit into reality.

Dealing with existent life is the currency The Art Of Pretending To Swim trades in. On it, O'Brien has proved himself once more to be an outstanding songwriter who isn't afraid to tackle the existentialism that comes with modernity. The fact that the results are so moving, so beautiful are testament to his artistic vision and talent.