DAMIEN RICE ***
USHER HALL, EDINBURGH
IT'S hard to disagree with the description of Damien Rice's music, first coined in NME, as being "Ikea rock". It's comfortable and it does the job, but it's all exactly the same.
Still, a certain breed of more refined music fan loves it.
The Usher Hall was packed out and Rice was the subject of ovations the likes of which John Lennon couldn't better were he to rise from the dead.
Rice is a songwriter of some heart and sensitivity, and his finest moments were worth sitting up and taking notice of. The Blower's Daughter, its "can't take my eyes off of you" chorus made famous in the film Closer, is a bitterly sweet love song, while Cannonball - stripped back as the first song of the encore, with Rice leaving his band backstage in favour of an acoustic guitar - was another centrepiece.
Magic was approached more than once, as when shining mirrorballs cast the pattern of a gleaming snowfall during Eskimo Friend. Yet too many of the other songs settled into his well-worn template of chucking-out time melancholy a bit too easily - still, at least Rice knows this, and cast himself in the role of teary-eyed drunk, wine glass in hand, as part of the build-up tale behind the epic closer Cheers Darling.
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