Lovesong: Damien Rice: I Don't Want to Change You

'It was like learning how to walk again, a little bit like going for a walk in the woods without really knowing where you're going"'

I like a sad song.
I was taken by the heartache of Damien Rice's debut 'O'.
It seemed like a genuine outpouring, coming on both sanguine and sad, it was beautifully restrained and contained, with Lisa Hannigan providing a detached and wonderfully calming foil for the injured party's malaise.
The follow up '9' ploughed a similar furrow but, Christ, did it burrow deep.... It was all so bleatingly bleak; 'Do you miss my smell"? etc. Too much blood from the same vein; what was once affecting and winning was effectively becoming a whine.
And now, after an 8 year hiatus comes 'My Favourite Faded Fantasy', his long awaited follow up and... Damien's still not a happy chappy - “You could be my poison, my cross, my razor blade/ I could love you more than life if I wasn’t so afraid.” - but this is a misery that loves company.
Sure, there's angst akimbo but there's now a keening subtlety to the drama; a haunting beauty to the melancholy that is engaging: truly captivating.
Here's Rice talking about his creative process:

Recorded in icy detachment at Sigur Ros's studio in Iceland, Rik Rubin's production is lush and lean; subtly expansive, allowing Rice to exhail. He's given the time and space to be genuinely sorrowful. The orchestrations and extended fades are a sign that airplay is the last thing on his mind.
As you can see from the video below, Damien won't be getting the next Coke or John Lewis ad, but this is sterlingly strong, engrossing, engaging, fractured, fucked up and full of hope.
It's all quite lovely.
Not so much a come back as a recovery...