Baroque-pop troubadour Damien Rice starts off “My Favourite Faded Fantasy” by sounding a lot like the late, great Jeff Buckley. Granted, Rice has a Irish accent, but his soft electric fingerpicking and incredibly high voice call to the mind “Mojo Pin,” the opening song on Buckley’s album “Grace.”
The point is that Rice, on the surface, does not come off as terribly original. You can very clearly tell who he’s trying to emulate, which burdens Rice with finding for himself some substantial distinguishing factor beyond his voice and guitar style.
At times, Rice achieves originality through his arrangements. Unfortunately, those arrangements tend to either go nowhere, or cross the line from intricate and technically impressive to excessive and overdone.
Take, for instance, the swelling strings which elevate the second half of mid-album track “Colour Me In.” What begins as a very simple acoustic folk song builds to a sweeping instrumental before fading into a quiet violin solo. The arrangement has a certain degree of restraint.
Then, take the over-nine-minute second track, “It Takes a Lot to Know a Man.” The song starts off fine, with a piano and shaker accented by brief string accompaniment. Rice’s vocals are multitracked to overlap, which delivers an interesting touch. Then, around the five-minute mark, the song pulls back completely. In the course of nearly five more minutes, strings, piano and horns play through a bizarre, dirge-like version of the song’s main theme. This does not add to the song, and it certainly does not make use of any particularly interesting techniques or novel string or horn parts. It’s just long.
Moments of such undue indulgence are fortunately few — but other times, the arrangements simply never build to anything. Six-minute songs which never increase in dynamics, adding additional instrumental elements without supplementing them with additional intensity, get very boring very quickly. The strength of Rice’s high tenor voice is not enough to make such lengthy, one-note songs worth sitting through.
Though this album has its moments, it far more often falls flat or feels overdone. Rice does not manage like more than a Jeff Buckley imitator — and in this, he doesn’t sound very interesting.
The most apt word in the album title is “Faded.” For the most part, that’s how these songs feel. Rice needs to find a middle ground between excess and doldrum, something like what he achieves on “Colour Me In” and “The Box,” only to a more consistent degree. The two extremes within which he currently seems most comfortable result in an imbalanced effort which is, by and large, quite boring.
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