Villagers

Add Date: November 9 

Artist: Villagers 

Album: The Pact (I'll Be Your Fever) (EP) 

Label: Domino 

Genre: Rock, folk 

Comments: Most of you DJs probably missed Becoming a Jackal, the excellent debut LP from Conor J. O'Brien's Villagers project, which landed on our playlist right at the end of May. That's an unfortunate bit of timing for a college radio station, but here's a chance for you to catch up on one of the most promising new acts to emerge in 2010. This 6-song EP centers around the studio version of "The Pact (I'll Be Your Fever)," one of the standouts from the record; it also features four live acoustic tracks from a performance at Santa Monica's KCRW--including two other album tracks and a Bob Dylan cover--as well as the B-side "On a Sunlit Stage."

In my review of Becoming a Jackal, I wrote that "less is truly more" for Villagers, whose sparse-but-not-spartan arrangements build off of acoustic guitar and piano, with the occasional strings and horns mixing in. That's even more true on this EP; the acoustic tracks feature just O'Brien and his guitar or piano--or, in the case of the first 90 seconds of "Cecilia & Her Selfhood," his a cappella vocals. Villagers may have arrived this summer, but O'Brien's music is no flash in the pan.