I can't remember the last time i was part of a crowd as entranced, as taken with a musician as the one assembled at the Maroquinerie Monday night to see Conor O'Brien's second performance of the day. In the course of ten songs, the Villagers frontman converted a room full of strangers to believers; you could feel it in the absolute silence that fell with the first chord of each song, in the applause that rang with the excitement of discovery.
O'Brien's voice is arresting, never staying in the same place for too long. He murmurs and yells, bleats and coos with an urgency and a directness that sears its way into you. And his lyrics, although consisting of such simple rhymes that you can sometimes anticipate his words before they leave his throat, never come across as forced or trivial. There are no holes.
He steps away from the microphone in "Home," breaking down that final barrier between performer and audience. The grating, almost-violent refrain of "Can you call me when we're almost halfway" tattooed into our minds could be a plea to a lover, a simple admission that he can't make the trip home on his own. In the context of the song as a whole, in which the contrast of the refrain with lines like "A girl with a look in her eyes, as if to say 'I despise such family ties'" forces the listener to reach his own conclusions. Like Matt Berringer, O'Brien's words are opaque; their meaning is in what we make of them.
And when the time came, when Conor uttered those words that we sometimes pray for, and sometimes dread, the crowd roared their dissent. One more song was not enough. With his words, with his voice, with his beautiful understated guitar playing, Conor had opened a door, and no one wanted it closed.
Check out a fantastic version of Conor singing his single 'Becoming a Jackal' on Jools Holland after the jump.
No comments:
Post a Comment