''The Art of Pretending to Swim'' is the fourth
studio album
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...
by Irish band
Villagers. It was released on 21 September 2018 under
Domino Recording Company.
Release
On 12 June 2018, the band announced the release of their new album, along with the single "A Trick Of The Light".
The second single "Fool" was released on 20 August 2018.
The third single "Again" was released on 10 September 2018.
Critical reception
''The Art of Pretending to Swim'' was met with "generally favorable" reviews from critics. At
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an
average
In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...
score of 77, based on 15 reviews.
Aggregator Album of the Year gave the release a 75 out of 100 based on a critical consensus of 15 reviews.
Mark Deming from ''
AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...
'' wrote about the album: "This music feels warmer and more naturalistic than his earlier experiments with one-man recording, and there's a gentle swing in the rhythms that suggests he's been listening to some smooth R&B lately.
he album
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...
is a strong example of how one man with an unlimited number of tracks to fill can create a compelling and revealing collection of songs.
Accolades
Track listing
Charts
Personnel
Musicians
* Conor J. O'Brien – vocals
* Cormac Curran – keyboard
* Kate Ellis – cello
* Cormac Ó Haodáin – french horn
* Deirdre O'Leary – clarinet
* Maaike Van Der Linde – flute
* Alan Darcy – sax
* Colm O'Hara – trombone
* Kevin Kelleher – trumpet
* Lisa Dowdall – viola
* Larissa O'Grady – violin
* Siobhán Kane – backing vocals
Production''
* Gavin Glass – engineer
* Peter Ashmore – engineer
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Art of Pretending to Swim
2018 albums
Villagers (band) albums
Domino Recording Company albums