"So, I used to pretty intense," he jokes after a similarly fire-and-brimstone performance earlier in the night. 'I Remember' captures both of Rice’s emotional extremes in the one song, beginning with whisper-quiet plucking and the head-over-heels euphoria of new romance, then the toxic fallout of a heart shattered into a million angry pieces as Rice layers distortion onto his acoustic as strobe lights and smoke billow around his fuming scorn. The rosy romance of 'Amie' remains stirring (the lyric ' Nothing’s changed/Just a little older that’s all' cuts deeper than usual), while the drunken bite back 'Cheers Darlin' has lost none of its snarling venom. On the Recital stage on Sunday night, those stories from O still carry emotional heft. O resonated with pretty much anyone who’d been madly in love and/or had their heart broken, from celebrity fans like Britney Spears and David Letterman, to first year Uni students with a penchant for troubled poetry. Singles like 'Cannonball' and the inescapable 'The Blower’s Daughter' had more grit and teeth than contemporaries like David Gray and José González, capable of crushing your soul the way Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley could, even if Rice's songs were more conventional. A tortured troubadour who recorded an intimate set of songs in his Dublin kitchen that ended up selling over two million copies. His debut album, O, made him 2003’s biggest word-of-mouth success story. But, these days, he’s more of a cult figure than the cultural force he once was. Performing solo at the Melbourne Recital Centre, at the final show of his first Australian tour in over a decade, the 45-year-old Irish songwriter still has the power to stun a room into silent awe with his emotionally wrought songs. It seems like a strange way for a multi-Platinum selling artist to end a sold out show, but the warm laughter it elicits from the crowd shows Damien Rice has a keen self-awareness regarding his own legacy.
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