Damien Rice finds himself in a curious position as he prepares to release My Favourite Faded Fantasy, his first album in nearly a decade. The Kildare singer first rose to prominence with the enormously successful records O and 9, both released in an era before YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. In the time since, Rice has kept a low profile; happy to make the occasional live appearance, participate in the odd collaboration and enjoy the continued — and somewhat unlikely — exposure his songs have enjoyed on The X Factor. Still, he returns to a musical landscape changed utterly — and undoubtedly has had cause to wonder if his audience is still waiting patiently for him. My Favourite Faded Fantasy also marks his first album without Lisa Hannigan, with whom Rice enjoyed a formidable musical chemistry.
All in all, the softly-spoken singer has a lot riding on this record. During his years out of the limelight, Rice has clearly been sharpening his songwriting chops, and has discovered a fondness for sonic experimentation — although his thematic preoccupations remain resolutely the same. The opening title track of My Favourite Faded Fantasy finds him singing in a delicate falsetto over gentle guitar notes, “You could be a favourite taste to cut my tongue.” As ever, Rice remains fixated on the angst of relationships, and if the self-analysis is vaguely troubling over the course of a full album, there is no doubting the passion with which it is delivered, nor the expertly crafted nature of the music underpinning his ruminations.
Like all of the songs on the record, the aforementioned opener builds from quiet beginnings to an overpowering crescendo. Starting out as a fragile slice of dream-pop, the track ends in a whirl of drums, bass, spiralling strings and squalling guitars, making for a heady art-rock brew with echoes of Radiohead. With an epic nine-minute running time, ‘It Takes A Lot To Know A Man’ is a three-part suite which segues — via a collage of vocal samples — from mournful ballad to baroque chamber waltz, boasting melancholic string and brass arrangements that positively ache.
Lyrically, with its meditation on the difficulties men and women have understanding each other, the track recalls Kate Bush’s art-pop classic ‘Running Up That Hill’. Given its scope and ambition, ‘It Takes A Lot’ offers definitive proof of Rice’s determination to expand his creative horizons on My Favourite Faded Fantasy.
Elsewhere, the singer is at his most confessional on the strikingly titled ‘The Greatest Bastard’, in which he wonders whether he deserves the titular mantle and observes that “I helped you open out your wings/ your legs and many other things, didn’t I?” By comparison, the likes of ‘I Don’t Want To Change You’ and ‘Colour Me In’ are Rice-by-numbers, and it’s a little hard to get excited about Damien reflecting on another bust relationship over a standard folk-rock backing.
A late highlight is the eight-minute ‘Trusty And True’, which features some soaring choral vocals that are sure to spark a singalong in a live setting. Rice then brings proceedings to a close with the fine ‘Long Long Way’, which commences with ethereal, Eno-like ambience and concludes with an orchestral swell of strings and brass.
Emotionally honest and musically direct, My Favourite Faded Fantasy contains many of the elements that made Rice an international star to begin with, whilst also satisfying his hunger for artistic growth. It’s difficult to say if Damien Rice will once again enjoy mass acceptance, but with this impressively accomplished effort, he has certainly kept up his part of the bargain.
OUT NOVEMBER 3