Damien Rice returns with strong album

The slight rasp is the signature of the indie singer-songwriter. It betrays the vulnerability, restrained emotion and cracked resolve that makes its genre alluring and so relatable. It’s the sound that has identified some of our favorite artists today and the promising ones of tomorrow: Ed Sheeran, Hozier, Ben Howard, the list goes on. But first, there was Damien Rice.

The Irish singer-songwriter released his first single, “The Blower’s Daughter,” in 2001 and has since been a cross-Atlantic success. His singles, EPs and LPs have captured an ever-popular introspection and vulnerability in the wake of love. He has sweetly hummed about breakups, his shortcomings and about the details he notices with eloquence, most notably in his violin-decorated repetition of “I can’t take my eyes off of you” in that single. He’s swoon-inducing. He can bring darkness, sultriness, airiness and fluffiness depending on the mood he sighs into his gentle compositions.

The 40-year-old is most often known for his simplicity, a shy acoustic guitar detailed with violin and his rich voice. On My Favourite Faded Fantasy, his third studio album in 12 years, Rice incorporates many of the elements that helped him establish credibility as a sentimental and emotive artist (specifically on “Colour Me In,” which sounds like the cousin of one of his former singles), and also introduces orchestral crescendos and a song structure in which there is a noticeable climax. Instead of keeping them short and sweet, Rice elongates his songs, after threatening to pass the 10-minute mark.

Rice winds up these longer tracks with the precision and delicacy of a spider as it spins its elaborate web: slowly, tightly and with the intent of ensnaring its subject. Each, too, takes time to unravel. Rice begins with soft allure, dropping deliberate pauses as the music builds, even tapering off into pregnant silence before resuming his spiral. It is with these delicately woven songs that Rice creates pseudo-novellas that smother the listener in a story, a mood, a moment and refuse to let them leave it.

“It Takes A Lot To Know A Man,” which clocks in at 9:33, epitomizes this. Four minutes into the song, Rice’s layered vocals abruptly hush into faded whispers and are left hovering until a crackling noise introduces a gentle and pained piano. The song transforms from ballad to instrumental waltz, one in which the bodies that would perform it would sway with elaborate flair.

The change of pace is refreshing for Rice, whose soft voice has always demonstrated a gentleness but whose intense passion and vocal flares communicate something lurking underneath the surface. On the title track, Rice bursts into a roar a minute from its conclusion with such vitality and alleviation that it feels therapeutic. On “My Favorite Faded Fantasy,” the shackles that Rice has used to restrain this hint of wildness are finally broken. His haunting, floating falsetto charts the course for the record with its stylistic departure.

“I got lost in your willingness to dream within a dream,” Rice simpers on the title track, lamenting his deep feelings for his former love, one he could replace with surrogates who will never be able to compensate for the connection he has lost. It’s a regret built on hypotheticals, of what could have been — “of what it all could be with you.”

Ironically, it is on the tracks that are the quietest, most textbook singer-songwriter balladry that Rice loses steam. The bareness of these tracks, accentuated with his layered vocals, does not lend itself to any particularly insightful message, or at least not in the same impactful way that Rice achieves on his other tracks. “Trusty and True,” the album’s penultimate song, is a dwindling, ambling eight-minute track that becomes tedious before it is fully realized.

The album, with its intensity and fire upfront, slinks as its progresses. The final songs offer a choral surge that feels benign compared to the tracks that preceded it. While the first songs communicated stinging yelps, pleas and implorations, Rice seems to concede, to sigh, to succumb. Even lyrically, Rice seems to get lazy, making awkwardly perfect rhymes (“trusty and true” with “lusty and lewd”) and repeating lines that are written almost like afterthoughts as though the repetition alone will help him believe they are true.

My Favourite Faded Fantasy is theatrical in many ways: composed of scenes that both exist as their own entities and as pieces of a larger puzzle. When Rice tests his own limitations, he succeeds in both surprising and delighting the listener with feeling that surpasses sentiment alone. The parts of it that dip and falter remove the listener from the story and allow them to drift away. Still, Rice demonstrates with this album that he will not settle for the routine and the stereotypes that his genre often lends him; instead, he will force you into his world and let you hover there, even if for just five minutes.