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Exclusive: Damien Rice's new album track-by-track

Hot Press has been given an exclusive first listen to the new Damien Rice album, which is released here by 14th Floor Records on November 3.

The Hot Press Newsdesk, 18 Oct 2006

Here are how the tracks stack-up:

‘9 Crimes’: Perverse as ever, the first Damien Rice album in almost five years kicks off with Lisa Hannigan crooning over sombre piano and muted percussion. Rice enters stage left for the second verse of an unfaithful lover’s confession: “It’s the wrong kind of place to be cheating on you…It’s the wrong time/She’s pullin’ me through/It’s a small crime/And I got no excuse”.

‘The Animals Were Gone’: Classically Rice-ean chord changes herald a ballad that seems to marry Yeats' ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’ to Cohen-esque Gitanes ‘n’ Cognac late night rumination. “We’ll call it Christmas when the adverts begin/I love your depression and I love your double chin,” our man intones, before the whole thing plays out with a hankies-at-the-ready strings coda courtesy of Vyvienne Long and Cora Venus Lunny.

‘Elephant’: Sounding for all the world like The Frames at their saddest and loudest, ‘Elephant’ starts out in ‘Blower’s Daughter’ territory before Rice soars to the very uppermost end of his range. Three minutes later the power chords have kicked in and the singer is yowling wounded recriminations.

‘Rootless Tree’: In which our protagonist waxes contemplative about a claustrophobic love over a supple rhythm pattern, before his temper gets the better of him: “Fuck you and all you’ve been through” he rages as neo-classical cello patterns insinuate themselves under the layers of guitars.

‘Dogs’: As close to whimsy as Damo’s likely to get (“She lives with an orange tree, the girl that does yoga”), this is a pretty little ditty about a winsome hippychick that Van wouldn’t have booted off Tupelo Honey for eating crisps. “She’s like an angel and she burns my eyes,” the singer declaims in a typically backhanded compliment. Rustic without being crusty, file beside Beth Orton’s last album in the nu-folk section.

‘Coconut Skins’: Keeping it on the light side, a busker-y strumalong with shakers, ‘la-da-da’ refrain and just a pinch of Richard Thompson in the salty dog vocal and caustic lyric.



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