Damien Rice in Kansas City, MO
It’s been a few years since Damien Rice toured in this part of America, but he’s coming back. On Sunday, May 13, 2007, Damien Rice is performing at the Uptown Theatre in Kansas City, MO. UPDATE: Review of Gig
It’s a big tour and includes St Louis on Friday May 11 at The Pageant, and gigs in Chicago (May 14), Denver (May 5) , Indianapolis (May 29), Detroit (May 17), Minneapolis (May 15), and Memphis (May 31) among many others.
Such was the success of Rice’s O album in America, that the last gig Damien played in the Kansas City region, was in Lawrence with The Frames opening in front of a packed and enthusiastic Kansas crowd. At that time in Ireland, Rice would have been opening for The Frames.
Since then, Frames main man Glen Hansard has been enjoying the limelight with the success of the musical Irish movie Once at Sundance.
For Rice it’s new album time again, and Damien is sticking with single character titles. This time it’s a number. 9 to be specific. I was going to review it for you when it came out as I listened to it non-stop for about a week, but I got distracted with teaching my dog to bark in Irish.
Actually 9 hasn’t been received very well by the critics, getting slammed in many cases. As loved as O was that was always likely. Two of the main criticisms are that it isn’t O, and that it is too much like O. Which seems kind of unfair if you’re at the receiving end.
Thre are certainly tracks on 9 that would sit comfortably on O, notably the opener and recent single 9 Crimes, but it’s the second single Rootless Tree that best sums up the album.
It’s not one of those tracks Rice comes up with that might have been written by Leonard Cohen or Nina Simone, it’s one of the others, the quiet slow slow quiet ones that build up to a noisy climax. There’s a few like this on this album, and I think they’re fine, but what appears to be rubbing everybody up the wrong way is Rice’s lyrics. He’s not happy.
Rices unhappiness isn’t the classic miserable downbeat loner in the bedsit, it’s a darker animal that wallows in bitter and nasty lyrics. For the most part I think you can ignore them - except for the loud shouted ‘eff you’ chorus of Rootless Tree, but others have told me they can’t get past them.
A bigger problem with 9 for me is that Rice doesn’t use female vocalist Lisa Hannigan anywhere near as much as he did on O, and the album suffers after her biggest contribution, the aforementioned 9 Crimes.
By the time Rice reaches Kansas City, who knows what sort of humour he will be in, but I think having 9 out of his system will make for better albums in the future, and I still actually like it anyway. UPDATE: Rice not bringing Hannigan
In Lawrence last time he played a couple of songs not on O, which we were led to believe were destined for the follow-up, but it seems Rice had a mini-breakdown thing and backed out of recording 9 at the first attempt when it was likely to be a different album. Perhaps we’ll get those tunes again in KC.
Tickets for general admission to the Uptown Theatre gig in KC are $30 and are available from TicketMaster.
See Also:
• Glen Hansard Doesn’t Come To Kansas City
• Tribe by Luka Bloom
• Irish Music is Not all Blustery and Heart Wrenching
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