Damien Rice

Here it is at last: prom for everyone too gloomily cool to actually stoop to a prom. If it’s faint praise to laud Irishman Damien Rice as the finest wounded-heart singer-songwriter to sulk down the pike in recent memory, maybe we should look past the falsetto, the cellos and the air of swooning heartbreak and concentrate on the songwriting itself: Track for track, O, Rice’s soaring debut, can go up against any pop you can name. Yeah, he’s strictly a ballad man, but he’s more interested in hooks than in moaning. Each song swells and falls with more dynamism than misery, equal parts velvet and muscle. And live, he throws himself in twice as hard. So throw down your dream journals and haul your heads out of your ovens, KC — this is a beautiful time to be all messed up inside.