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**Damien Rice - My Favourite Faded Fantasy**
★★★★☆

After eight years of self-imposed exile, Damien Rice emerged from his creative wilderness clutching "My Favourite Faded Fantasy" like a man who'd spent nearly a decade wrestling with his own demons in the dark. The Irish troubadour's third studio album arrives as both a deeply personal confession and a sonic departure from the intimate folk arrangements that made him a darling of the early noughties indie scene.

The backstory reads like a cautionary tale of artistic combustion. Following the massive success of 2002's "O" and 2006's "9", Rice spectacularly imploded his creative partnership with longtime collaborator Lisa Hannigan, citing the need for "creative control" – music industry speak for "I've lost my bloody mind." What followed was a protracted period of soul-searching that took him from his native Ireland to Iceland's volcanic landscapes, where much of this album was conceived amidst the kind of dramatic scenery that would make even the most grounded songwriter prone to existential melodrama.

Musically, Rice has traded some of his earlier acoustic intimacy for a more expansive, occasionally electronic-tinged palette that suggests long nights spent with Bon Iver records and perhaps too much Icelandic brennivín. The falsetto that once whispered sweet melancholies now soars and cracks with the weight of accumulated experience, while his arrangements incorporate everything from glacial synth pads to gospel-influenced organ swells that would make Richard Hawley nod approvingly.

Opening track "My Favourite Faded Fantasy" sets the tone with its hypnotic guitar loop and Rice's most vulnerable vocal performance since "The Blower's Daughter." It's a song about the beautiful lies we tell ourselves, delivered with the kind of raw honesty that makes you want to both embrace the man and check his medicine cabinet. The title track flows seamlessly into "It Takes a Lot to Know a Man," where Rice channels his inner Nick Cave over a deceptively simple arrangement that builds to a cathartic crescendo of strings and self-recrimination.

"The Greatest Bastard" stands as the album's most immediate moment, a rare uptempo number that finds Rice embracing his role as the villain in his own narrative with something approaching dark humor. Meanwhile, "I Don't Want to Change You" showcases his renewed confidence as a melodist, wrapped in production that recalls the spacious beauty of Talk Talk's later work. The album's emotional centerpiece, "Trusty and True," strips everything back to voice, guitar, and the kind of melody that lodges itself in your consciousness like a beautiful splinter.

Yet for all its hard-won wisdom and sonic adventurousness, "My Favourite Faded Fantasy" occasionally suffers from the very self-consciousness that drove Rice into exile. Songs like "Long Long Way" meander when they should soar, weighed down by arrangements that feel more studied than spontaneous. The album's 45-minute runtime suggests judicious editing, but one can't shake the feeling that Rice's perfectionist tendencies have sometimes smoothed away the rough edges that made his earlier work so compelling.

The production, handled by Rice himself alongside Rick Rubin, strikes a delicate balance between the intimate and the epic. Rubin's influence is felt in the album's dynamic range and the way silence is used as effectively as sound, while Rice's own vision ensures that even the most orchestrated moments retain an essential humanity.

Eight years on, "My Favourite Faded Fantasy" has aged remarkably well, standing as both a successful artistic rebirth and a bridge between Rice's past and whatever future he might yet imagine. While it lacks the immediate emotional impact of "O" or the experimental boldness of "9," it possesses a hard-earned maturity that feels genuinely transformative rather than merely therapeutic.

Rice may have spent the better part of a decade learning to live with himself, and the result is an album that transforms personal reckoning into universal art. In an era of instant gratification and algorithmic attention spans, "My Favourite Faded Fantasy" makes a compelling case for the value of taking time – both to create and to truly listen. Sometimes the longest journeys lead us exactly where we need to be.