Given the emotional turmoil surrounding the making of Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice’s second album, 2006’s 9, it’s perhaps surprising that a successor has appeared at all, even after a troubled eight-year hiatus. His vocal foil from those days, Lisa Hannigan, is long gone, but such is the strength of his songwriting here, she is barely missed. The nine-minute It Takes a Lot to Know a Man builds up an unstoppable momentum before a beautifully orchestrated coda; The Greatest Bastard has a raw and disarming candour to it. He claims not to care whether his comeback is a commercial success, but one suspects it will be regardless. It deserves to be.
