Damien Rice - My Favourite Faded Fantasy (Album Review)
Wednesday, 05 November 2014
Written by Huw Baines
It’s impossible to approach ‘My Favourite Faded Fantasy’ without first confronting the passing of time. Who were you eight years ago, when Damien Rice’s second album, ‘9’, was released? It’s a cast-iron bet that you were a very different person to the one you are now.
Well, so was Damien Rice. Since then, he’s wrestled with the trappings and weight of success, lost that wide-eyed innocence that prefaces a breakthrough hit and parted ways with someone who previously played an important role in his personal and musical life.
This is the first Rice record not to feature the vocals of Lisa Hannigan, and one on which he’s clearly happy to explore different sides of himself as an artist. His earlier work featured its share of unexpected swells and short diversions into wide open spaces, but this is something else altogether.
With producer Rick Rubin facilitating things - “I came to Rick mostly based on what I didn't know about him, rather than what I did,” Rice has said - he has dispensed with form and let things flow.
‘My Favourite Faded Fantasy’ is home to songs that wander, songs that are unwieldy and absolutely unsuitable for consumption in the same meal as offerings from today’s radio-friendly singer-songwriter bunch.
Only one track dips below the five minute barrier and many drift from beginnings that could have found a home on ‘O’ into sweeping, but sometimes difficult, terrain. Regrets, anger and a few buds of optimism sprout from the album’s title, informing each twist and turn.
It would be fair to say that this is an album free to meander, but in truth it’s almost as though its songs are blown off track by a desire to thrash things out and understand them. Rice hasn’t only opened himself up - Rubin’s involvement also came about as Rice felt he could be “comfortable being open and being me and being vulnerable” around him - he’s found new musical avenues.
His use of space and dynamics has been taken up a notch, with sparse drums appearing with little fanfare and strings, pulled from Bill Withers soul and the mournful air of Older Chests, cascading across previously understated arrangements.
Rice’s melodic gifts are well used, too, but the hooks here are often left somewhat unfinished. By the time It Takes A Lot To Know A Man reaches its near 10-minute conclusion, for example, its early throes as an effective, atmospheric nod to the past are a distant memory. Detached, layered vocals take over at the midpoint and it’s hard to see the trickery as anything other than indicative of the competing influences at work here.
There’s a deep vein of self-analysis in the lyric sheet, where Rice seeks to work through what makes him tick on the most basic level, to understand where his character traits rub each other up the wrong way and how to reconcile past and present.
This is an album, both in terms of the notes on the paper and the words beside them, that you can get lost in. It’s not always the most gracious host, and it won’t make any apologies for that, but Rice’s long-awaited comeback is a living, breathing embodiment of the journey that led to its creation. It’s not perfect, but neither is the man who wrote it, and neither are you or I. Take it in in one sitting and see where you end up.
Damien Rice Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri November 07 2014 - LONDON Palladium
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