Damien Rice - My Favourite Faded Fantasy

The third full-length studio release by the Irish singer-songwriter

Produced by Rick Rubin

180-gram double vinyl; album download included

Plated and pressed at Quality Record Pressings!

"A beautifully orchestrated, vulnerable work, swelling with lamentation and resignation, and the feeling that experience, no matter how emotionally brutal, contributes to our own betterment." — Paste

"Everything sings here, no matter how dark the matter at hand." — Drowned in Sound

Irish troubadour Damien Rice is back with his third album and first in eight years, My Favourite Faded Fantasy. Produced by Rick Rubin. My Favourite Faded Fantasy amounts to only his third record in 12 years. Rice doesn't do anything in a hurry. He lets his songs unfold at a deliberate, almost stately pace and he's similarly unconcerned about rushing through his career, writes AllMusic.

He teamed with Rubin, the Zen master of acoustic basics, to shape an exquisitely textured collection of eight songs that runs just a hair over 50 minutes. Rice doesn't greatly expand his aesthetic — he's still equal parts Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke, cut with the sullen singer/songwriter sophistication of Nick Drake — but refinement is Rice's signature.

He whittles away the excess in his words and melody, then dresses the detailed sculpture in finely tailored accouterments of slightly sighing strings, strummed guitars, and a hint of forward momentum lying within buried rhythms. This means My Favourite Faded Fantasy may come on as a bit underwhelming at first but that's the intent: 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.