[rating=9.00]
Eight years after his last studio album, 9, Damien Rice returns with a short but powerful collection of emotional folk. Though much has changed in the meantime – everything from musical collaborators to location – all of the core elements that make up a Damien Rice album are present in My Favourite Faded Fantasy, Rice’s third studio album and first produced by Rick Rubin.
Surprisingly, Lisa Hannigan’s absence doesn’t detract from the experience. Though their harmonies once helped define Rice’s sound, he is more than capable of carrying the album without Hannigan. It helps that this release is better written than 9, which at times suffered from clichéd lyrics and clunky transitions. On My Favourite Faded Fantasy, Rice’s songs are more eclectic in terms of structure and dynamics and more varied in tempo.
Rice’s music has always had a cinematic quality, but My Favourite Faded Fantasy takes that to a whole new level. The title track opens the album with sparse finger picking and Rice’s whispered falsetto, his melancholic voice getting caught in his throat. “You could hold the secrets that save me from myself,” he says before admitting that he is too afraid to love. Alternating between hushed verses and string-drenched interludes, distorted guitars drop into the mix at the song’s climax as Rice yells, “I’ve never loved like you.” The song recalls the bombast of “I Remember,” the show-stopper from Rice’s debut album, O.
The second track, “It Takes a Lot To Know a Man,” is equally ambitious. In his trademark soulful croon, subtle beauty laced with sorrow, Rice sings of a fear of intimacy. “It takes a lot to breathe, to touch, to feel the slow reveal of what another body needs,” he sings over a soft piano melody punctuated by a sweeping string section. In the song’s startling bridge, it abruptly transitions from a mid-tempo piano ballad into an eerie soundscape of ominous thumping keys and Rice’s distorted vocals, followed by five minutes of an orchestral outro dominated by cello and viola.
My Favourite Faded Fantasy thrives both in those grandiose moments and when stripped down to Rice as a standard singer/songwriter serenading with an acoustic guitar in hand. “I Don’t Want To Change You” has an honest coffee shop intimacy, Rice’s vulnerable cracking voice carrying more emotional heft than the viola flourishes. Though most of the songs are long, they are tightly crafted. Rice is equally capable of softening your heart with a groundswell of intertwined instruments or with sparse notes interrupting silence.
