The whole album is both hauntingly intimate and intensely epic – it moves from timid guitar and cracked, uncertain vocals to swelling magnificence; a giant orchestral wave crashing against an unseen shore, with Rice howling stunningly heart-wrenching lyrics above it all.
My Favourite Faded Fantasy is one of the most outright depressing yet simultaneously beautiful records of 2014.
The presence of Rick Rubin brings the expected studio nous but Rice meets him in earnest, his arrangements often bewitching and sometimes extraordinary.
While his style remains inconsistent and his lyrics can verge on cheesy, the music never gets stale. Each word is sung like the weight of his world depends on it.
Although there are only eight tracks on My Favourite Faded Fantasy, there’s a pleasing breadth of ambition to most of them – Rice and Rubin really give these tracks room to grow and develop.
It's not designed to grab, it's designed to soothe and then slowly worm its way into the subconscious, which is where these eight songs reveal themselves to be as strong as anything else Rice has written.
This record still feels raw, it still feels intimate, but a little more bold in its sentiments. It’s in those moments of bravery and risk that Rice still stands worthy of his heart-wrenching troubadour title.
These are rich songs, meant to be savored and taken in with repeated listens.
Although it has neither O’s daring queering of singer-songwriter tropes nor the bitter energy of 9, My Favourite Faded Fantasy, if rarely surprising, is Rice’s most sonically cohesive album to date.
My Favourite Faded Fantasy comes with the kind of self-reflection that only time can provide, but doesn’t have the musical innovation that the time away should have provided.
Where O was direct, raw and sober – cold and real in its confessional heartbreak – MFFF is aimlessly wistful and therefore more difficult to connect with.
On this album Damien Rice takes his stripped down folk sound and tries to take out the "stripped down" part of it for most of the album, this allows him to experiment with longer more epic tracks but it also doesn't sacrifice the emotional simple and genuine feel you get from his lyrics. Some songs feel grandios and huge, take for example the 9 minute epic that is It Takes A Lot To Know A Man with its slow build and stunning string section near the end of the song. Trusty and True has ... read more
Epic yet intimate, this is such a special album. A lean 8 tracks but uses every single moment of it. There's not a moment wasted here and the songwriting Damien Rice brings to it is something else. An all time favourite, deeply underdiscovered.
Come back to us Damien!
Faves: My Favourite Faded Fantasy, It Takes A Lot to Know a Man, Colour Me In, The Box
I love Rick Rubin's production, the zen touches are perfect. The singing is hauntingly depressing, and beautiful, and this album tells stories of anger, love, loss, and hatred. You feel Damien. This is undoubtedly one of my favorite works in soft rock.
1 | My Favourite Faded Fantasy 6:12 | 100 |
2 | It Takes a Lot to Know a Man 9:33 | 96 |
3 | The Greatest Bastard 5:04 | 95 |
4 | I Don't Want to Change You 5:26 | 88 |
5 | Colour Me In 5:18 | 96 |
6 | The Box 4:27 | 97 |
7 | Trusty and True 8:09 | 88 |
8 | Long Long Way 6:21 | 85 |
#7 | / | The Telegraph |
#24 | / | Time Out London |
#27 | / | Consequence of Sound |
#45 | / | Paste |