Villagers - Where Have You Been All My Life?

Pitchfork 75

Look up "re-recorded" on whatever streaming site you use, and you’ll find original performers doing hasty and underwhelming renditions of their biggest hits. Everything from "Hang On Sloopy" to "Pour Some Sugar on Me" to "O.P.P." stand as testaments that it’s nearly impossible to improve upon a definitive version. Villagers prove to be the exception to this rule with Where Have You Been All My Life?, a collection of re-recordings of material from their three previous albums that reframes the songs in an impressively cohesive manner.

Many artists re-record their best work because they’re in a dry spell and/or they’re sick of watching their old label make money off of the songs they made when they were young and signed a bad contract. What usually hinders re-recorded versions is a sense of "we got it right the first time" frustration that undermines the spirit of the original, but the new versions on Where Have You Been… swell with a different determination, one of "We’ve got to get it right this time." Recorded in one day last July, these mostly acoustic versions were reportedly all first or second takes with no overdubs. The band had already been touring in support of last April’s Darling Arithmetic for three months by the time they went into RAK Studios in London. Arithmetic tracks account for half of the songs on here, but Villagers have restructured the older songs to fit the sound of the newer material, unifying them in their delicate harmonies, brushed drums, and double bass arrangements.

A definite highlight on this collection is "Memoir," which Charlotte Gainsbourg recorded a version of in 2011 and which appeared as a Villagers B-side a year later. The distracting crowd noise and flat-tire-on-the-highway rhythm of that version were wisely left off this most recent recording, and the song touches a nerve even more discomfiting than before. Its desperate romantic lyrics hit more directly. "In the orgy I can vaguely hear the outline of your call," singer and songwriter Conor O’Brien sings at one point before telling the subject of the song, "you were the lighthouse to my broken boat." The latter image connects the song on this compilation with "My Lighthouse," which first appeared on 2013’s {Awayland}.

"The Waves," also originally from {Awayland}, is another highlight. On that album, it had an electronic undercurrent, which was later taken several fathoms deeper when remixed by house duo Psychemagik. The drastic acoustic reinterpretation on this album feels like the song’s natural state, the long-building crescendo threatens to swallow the singer before he has finished saying his piece. The Where Have You Been All My Life? title comes from a line in “The Soul Serene,” but naming it as such feels like Villagers begging for new audiences to ask that same question of the album. The music within warrants it.