thoughtcrumbs

Damien Rice

The Crocodile Cafe was fifth-circle-of-hell hot and the kahlua was of the cheap, pungent variety, but what did it matter when Sounds Eclectic Irish darling Damien Rice had crossed both an ocean and a continent to be with us? Unlike the plaintive acoustic ballands on his CD, "O," the first three songs were funky, sweatily aggressive, and sung into a duct-taped distortion mic. He then turned to his more familiar, David Gray-ish melodies, backed by a cellist, bass player, and cue ball drummer, an ersatz Lisa Hannigan, filling in harmonies for the absent chanteuse who was otherwise occupied with the Dublin theatre. Damien prefaced "Amie" with the story of a "passed off" boy, sleeping alone in a neighbor girl's bed, told in a juvenile Irish brogue. Unfortunately, a couple of white hats in the audience felt this was their carte blanche to launch into their own poorly-accented heckling and singing-along. Damien bantered briefly with them, and then just chose to drown them out. Other highlights: Vyvienne, the cellist, did a solo rendition of "Purple Haze." Damien railed on singer-songwriters' arse-derived "honesty" and then broke his high E string. The band concluded with a lusciously layered "Volcano," this time compensating for a lost Lisa with a recorder, sampling and playing back Damien's vocals every four measures. And this is a guy who loves his chord modulations and vocal texture variations. After restringing and tuning for an interminable length, Damien finally returned for a forty minute encore. After snapping his A this time, he brought his opening band, the Pedestrians, back onstange to jam to a medley in Am that included "Creep," "All Along the Watchtower," Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah," and a half-dozen other crowd pleasers. Having satisfied everyone's desires and sapped their energy, Damien and his crew left the stage, triumphant rock prizefighters, and we shlepped our weary bodies home.