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.
‘Me, My Yoke And I’: On the other hand, there’s a fist. ‘Me, My Yoke And I’ hinges around a mesmeric guitar figure, distorted vocal (“I moan like a big dog”) and general fractiousness siphoned straight from PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me. Watch this one scare the crap out of the David Gray brigade at gigs. The heaviest thing he’s ever done.
‘Grey Room’: Quintessential type O negative: hushed drums, mournful cello, one-bar-electric-fire-in-a-bedsit lyrics (“I stay up all night and all that I write is a grey, grey tune”). Nice, but the boy might want to leave the house more often.
‘Accidental Babies’: Bare piano and vocal, like Neil Young at his most lovelorn. Damien torments himself with hypothetical questions directed at a certain Miss Ex: “Is he dark enough, enough to see your light/And do you brush your teeth before you kiss/Do you miss my smell?/Is he bold enough to take you on/Do you feel like you belong?/Does he drive you wild/Or just mildly free/What about me?”
‘Sleep Don’t Weep’: A hushed, shimmering lullaby, in which the singer attempts to put a band-aid on the various lesions and sores he’s inflicted on himself and his various beloveds throughout the course of the record. Cheers.
For more – much more – on the boy Rice, grab an issue of Hot Press out on Thursday.