Villagers – review

Casual Brits-watchers might conclude that non-US folk music has failed to lift the gauntlet thrown down by Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver and Beirut, shrugged, and fallen back on identikit charisma vacuums with acoustic guitars and 18th-century farmer bands. Not so: at the very moment some bore-next-door called Ben Howard is declared the most exciting popstar of his generation at the O2, in less dullard-obsessed corners of east London, Ireland's Villagers are touting a far more flavoursome folk artistry.

It's not just the way their early single Becoming a Jackal resembles Bright Eyes reworking Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes that has seen Villagers dubbed, well, the new Bright Eyes. Mainman Conor O'Brien also shares Conor Oberst's tense aura of restrained anger and anguish, his often raw and bitter lyrics dissecting love like an autopsy, and his tremulous vocals charged with an emotional instability close to cracking. Sure enough, his tight-coiled rhythms and scalpel-precise melodies occasionally tip over into manic episodes of Bad Seeds violence (on Passing a Message), cathartic sonic floods (The Bell) or all-out operatic cataclysms (Grateful Song). Yet this lithium folk edge – all gathering-storm guitars and eerily romantic references to skinned corpses and self-immolation – is tempered by light and artful touches of Beirut mariachi, misty harmony and moments of profound tenderness such as In a Newfound Land You Are Free, a deeply moving discussion of mutual responsibility, trust and dependence between a father and his newborn child.

The latter half of the set showcases the widescreen adventurism of Villagers' second album, {Awayland}, where O'Brien thickens the plot with bleak-hearted carnival pop single Nothing Arrived, the brooding Mercy Street moods of The Waves and the slasher folk frenzy Earthly Pleasure, the fervent tale of a killer on the rampage that has O'Brien howling "Beelzebub is in our banks!" All proof that folk music remains a rich and fertile breeding ground, even as the Brits depicts a barren wasteland.