New Damien Rice

The rare album I'm excited about: the new Damien Rice.  It's now streaming at NPR music.

There's nothing reluctant or halfhearted about the bold, dreamy, impeccably rendered music on My Favourite Faded Fantasy, which gets plenty of room to breathe and seethe over the course of more than 50 minutes. Take "It Takes A Lot To Know A Man." What the song lacks in smashing insights about gender relations, it finds in abundant chamber-folk beauty, as the proceedings stretch out for nine and a half dreamy minutes.

Rice loves to let songs build to lavish climaxes, and My Favourite Faded Fantasy does much the same thing as a grand whole: Though its singles ("I Don't Want To Change You," "The Greatest Bastard") reside in the album's first half, its back half is a Murderer's Row of album highlights strung together. Rice's best song in more than a decade, "Colour Me In" hits a spectacular, string-swept crescendo late; a few minutes later, the lovable eight-minute "Trusty And True" transitions slowly from a lightly plucked whisper to a lushly rousing, suitably philosophical Irish sing-along.