Top Ten Irish Albums: O

Key Notes Top Ten Irish Albums: 7

Damien Rice - O

This blog entry could get Key Notes in a great deal of trouble.  You see, while the good people of CLUAS respect all musical tastes, there is something about Damien Rice that splits the CLUAS writers firmly into two camps.  Those that don't like him and those that really don't like him.  Key Notes is being facetious, of course, but it is fair to say that this blog is in the minority on this site when it comes to Rice.  However, wouldn't it be a very boring site if every single one of us had the same opinion?

From what I can gather, between the expletives, it is Rice's image as the head troubadour of the Irish singer-songwriter set that seems to grate with most people.  While it's true that this blog was going through a bit of singer-songer phase when he bought O, it was during his time with Juniper that Key Notes first became aware of his fellow Kildareman.  Juniper were one of those bands, like Ten Speed Racer, that always seemed less than the sum of their parts and Bell X1's status as one of Ireland's most popular bands (bra detectors that they may be) and the phenomenal success of Rice beyond these shores would seem to verify that.

However, strip away Rice's image as a messiah amongst certains sections of the Irish music scene and the fact that every (formerly - they're all broke trying to pay for their second home now) middle class family in Ireland own a copy of O (along with White Ladder and whatever that Dido one was) and you're left with O, an album that embraces its obvious flaws and is all the better for it.  It is far from technically perfect, but it has something much more important, magic. 

O touches a part of the conscience that you spend most of your time trying to hide (the part that makes you cry at the end of Big Fish or watching a documentary on Hillsborough).  Musically, there is very little difference between Rice and most folksy singer-songwriters.  What's different about O is that Rice's songwriting is so raw, so emotional that, like Leonard Cohen, you can forgive the flaws because you feel empathy for the characters in his songs.  It helps, of course, to have the vocal talents of Lisa Hannigan and the heart-tugging cello of Vyvienne Long on your side, but more than that Rice has a way with words that escapes most of his contemporaries.  Any songwriter that can turn a song about masturbation (Aime) into a love song is doing something right. 

O is one of those albums that touches greatness without having any stand out tracks, instead it is the sum of their parts, the collective consciousness of the 12 disparate characters that make up the album that draws you in.  It doesn't matter that Rice followed up O with the lacklustre 9, an album that seems worse now than when this blog reviewed it for his first CLUAS piece.  O is, like Astral Weeks, an album that divides opinon.  Some people can't see beyond the musical sparseness of either and yet their are others, like Key Notes, that believes that sometimes, just sometimes, the music plays second fiddle to the story of the album, indeed, the story of O.

Damien Rice - Cold Water

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