You might expect eight years out of the game to have dulled the instincts of a singer-songwriter whose art is predicated on honesty and self-laceration. Damien Rice has returned to conduct his forensic examinations of his psyche with even greater ferocity and intensity. The 40-year-old Irish singer’s third album, My Favourite Faded Fantasy, is a musically and emotionally momentous offering. It seems unlikely that he can convey its heartfelt, brittle nuances live alone with a guitar, and yet he does so magnificently.
This is largely because he has never been the archetypal James Blunt/David Gray-style coffee-shop troubadour. Armed with pedals and loops, Rice interlaces his barbed reveries with blasts of fuzzed white noise. Shards of MC5-like feedback punctuate pained recollections of emotional turmoil. He is that most dangerous of men, a cynical romantic, able to identify his crippling commitment-phobia, yet not to correct it. Contemplating yet another self-sabotaged love, he adopts both a keening falsetto and a serrated scream on the new album’s title track. The Greatest Bastard finds him delivering a damning self-critique with lashings of pitch-black humour.
Between songs, Rice is charm itself, as he would need to be to get himself into so many relationships that he can proceed to screw up. He tells us about his “inner dickhead”, before he hangs himself out to dry one more time on Colour Me In, yet he never remotely veers near self-pity, and his melodies are pure alchemy.
For the encore, Rice croons Trusty and True unamplified in total darkness, before the lights rise to illuminate a 50-strong, black-clad choir behind him. It’s a remarkable end to what has been a truly staggering evening.
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