Damien Rice's 9 (above right) is one of my all-time favourite albums. It's also a favourite of Harry Orme, who I recently met via email; Harry sings and plays guitar for People Poems, a Leeds-based act whose big and beautifully bare songs are quite clearly influenced by the quivery, emotive sound for which Damien Rice is known.
However, as Harry told me a few weeks ago, Rice's debut album O "just edges past" 9 in his book. I took issue with this - I'm firmly of the opinion that 9 > O - and so I challenged Harry to a kind of verbal duel, to be held right here on The Album Wall.
Below, Harry has very kindly explained why he thinks O is better than 9. First of all, though, here's my argument for the latter...
The Case for 9
by Joel Dear
Perhaps
9 just came along at a better moment than
O. I didn't really listen to much music in the early '00s, and when the floodgates finally did open a little later that decade, I was too busy devouring the discographies of R.E.M. and Radiohead and other alt. rock giants to pay any attention to a beige-coloured slip of an album with little more than a scribble on the front cover.
9, on the other hand, could hardly have found me at a better time; I actually didn't get 'round to Damien Rice's second album until late 2007, roughly one year after its initial release, but the me who bought that CD one wet autumn afternoon was the perfect audience for the music thereupon. I was a self-centred teenage idiot who thought he was lonely and depressive and romantic, and those ten tracks suited to a T the persona that I had constructed for myself. I imagine The Smiths scratched a similar itch for people who were teens in the 1980s.
