Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The intervening years away from the full blown effects of playing in a studio have done nothing to dispel the shrouded mist that plays with the subconscious thought that Damien Rice is a man of lyrical immensity and an artist who paints the clearest pictures with just a well placed finger on a guitar string.
Damien Rice seems to have been around for years, performing, playing, digesting the world and its heartaches and yet inconceivably My Favourite Faded Fantasy is only the third studio album of his solo career. It is like researching the life and times of William Wordsworth and somehow stumbling across a text that suggests the nature loving poet wrote nothing for 20 years and then came back to poetic life in time to muse upon a hill about the ways of clouds and daffodils; some points of reference just don’t sit right within the soul.
Aside from the wonderful alliterative nature of the album title, My Favourite Faded Fantasy, alludes much to the nature of being alive and the ways that a person can be seen, discoloured by unsavoury drawn tongues and the gentleness of spirit. Songs that hide much argument and tarnish towards those that may seek unfavourable countenance wrapped up in the gentleness of a warm loving embrace and a plea for hope in the shadows. There are few that have this ability, even less than use the words in the twin aspects of hope and desire and forlorn misgivings.
Damien Rice gets to grips with having been out of the main spotlight for a while with delicate ease. His craft is such that the songs almost bleed raw emotion, they gainfully, and almost humbly, beg forgiveness in interrupting the flow of what could be considered a dangerous time in world history by offering another way of looking at the world. It is the moments of introspection, the journey of inward looking appeal that keeps the gun out of the hand of the mindless and bleakness on offer.
Tracks such as It Takes A Lot To Know A Man, the wonderful The Greatest Bastard, Colour Me In and The Box offer the listener the chance to live within a spectrum of introspection, to remember the misdeeds of petulant arrogance and whimsy and offer a proper alternative vision, the chance to relive, in the mind at least, what really should have been if the way offered was the one taken.
Some musicians are missed more than others when they don’t record an album for a while. Some you would never know they were away and even if you like the album, the artist that placed it before you, you find you no longer care about. Thankfully Damien Rice is so entrenched in the former that the heart jumps out of the imprisoning shell and greets his words with glee.
A very welcome return to one of the best Irish artists of the last 20 years!
Ian D. Hall