O by Damien Rice

August 20th, 2005 | Filed under Reviews

I’ll be honest, I just kind of stumbled into this one. I had seen Closer, had enjoyed it immensely and thought that dovetailing the film with the same song was a really interesting touch. I did not however think I needed to run to iTunes and download every song in the film.

A couple of weeks later I was walking around the house, procrastinating one of my final papers for college. It was something I knew I’d have no trouble writing, and I was treating it as such. As I walked through the living room on the way to my room, I came across Mendenhall and Harper starting to watch the film. As the opening song/titles hit I realized the meaning and intensity which the film draws from that song and the melody and emotional impact ingrained themselves onto my brain.

Instead of getting to work on my paper I instantly went online with hopes of finding the song. Only problem is that the stupid studios didn’t put out a soundtrack for the film. So I was left searching IMDB looking for what songs were used in the film and then searching for the right song on iTunes. Needless to say I finally found and immediately downloaded it. After listening to The Blower’s Daughter about 10 times I realized I might want to download the rest of the album.

The album rocks…get it. Every song on the album is an excellent achievement in the blending of vocals, harmonies and raw emotion and that has continually kept it in high rotation at my place. I was so excited that I might have been onto some new music, and that maybe I could put it into a short film or something that I looked up the second best track, Cannonball on IMDB only to find out that it had been used in In Good Company. I feel this is totally unfair as the film already used all kinds of good music by Iron & Wine and my theory of pop music in films is that a song can only be used by one film…and In Good Company stole way to many songs for being a good/decent movie.

So, I somehow moved all over the preverbial map on this one, but the album really is great. Every song has it’s own feel, and are highly emotional without being emotional for emotions sake. I’m not sure if that made any sense…but I like it lots.