London Tabernacle
Fly-ed Rice

Three of the best albums of the year - Wilco’s ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’, My Computer’s ‘Vulnerabilia’‚ and Damien Rice’s ‘O’ - all scratch something about the facts of life in 2002 that the likes of Coldplay or Darius, say, fail to reach. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something innately human - remember that? - about all of them. Like that part in Planet of The Apes where Charlton Heston finds the remains of the speaking doll. It’s the sound of emotion resonating beyond the circuitry. Something that sounds really real.

On record it’s difficult to explain what makes Rice so convincing. He’s a gifted composer no doubt, and he has a great voice, skipping confidently to all the places that his heroes, Buckley and Yorke, occupy. Songs like ‘Amie’ and ‘Eskimo’ are instantaneously memorable and certainly palatable enough for the Dido crowd. He’s talented in the traditional sense; not radically so.

Yet live, he takes what should be earthbound music to the stratosphere. Certainly, tonight’s majestic performance holds more in common with the ambitious risk of Gene Clark’s ‘‘No Other'‚ or Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks‚’ with its notions of “the love that loves the love that loves.”

The reason? Unlike other troubadours, Rice has secret weapons: Lisa Hannigan, Vyvienne Long, Shane Fitzsimons and Tomo. For despite the billing, Damien Rice is very much a band. Without these added components he would be very good‚ going on excellent; with them, he becomes unstoppable. Whenever Hannigan’s miraculous voice or Long’s sonorous cello come to the fore, the music reaches another dimension. As a five-piece they aim for magic and, quite frequently, touch it. You imagine they never get tired of rehearsals.

The excursions into ‘Creep’, ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ and ‘Hallelujah’, (a cover in a carbon copy style of Buckley Jnr’s own cover) are a little too obvious, as are the occasional theatrics, but that’s the nature of risk taking. 90% of everything else is little short of amazing, most encouragingly the B-side ‘Woman Like A Man’ and a ferocious new song built around a recurring Led Zep riff.

Already formidable, they will only get better.

by Adam Webb
http://www.barflyclub.com/articles/live-reviews/6576.html