Sinead O'Connor - Sean-Nos Nua

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Free Music Notes for Sean-Nos Nua

Free Music Review: Splendid, just like you thought it would be.
Hit: 5 Stars

The wisdom with which O'Connor has put this record together is immediately apparent in its concentration on her voice. Her scalding mezzo-soprano remains unique in Celtic music, one of the few indispensible voices in this glutted field and impossible to imitate without embarrassment. Her spectacular and erratic talent has been anchored by this voice. As a confessional singer-songwriter, she's intelligent but somewhat mannered, resorting somewhat too often to an atmospheric bag of tricks when her run-of-the-mill analytic powers fail her. O'Connor's voice, however, maintains a very Irish chastity that balances her very Irish tendency to excess. Its extreme quality imposes a discipline on her rather than the reverse, challenging her to project shadings of emotion subtle and mature enough to live up to its severity. It has always been the most grown-up thing about her.

On "Sean Nos Nua," Sinead takes the tempering effect of her own voice upon her and uses it to revive some hoary material indeed. Her taste does not run to Enya-ish mysticism on this album, despite the wealth of mystical interpretations in her liner notes (intelligent but somewhat mannered). She has chosen songs that one associates with the maudlin populism inherent in Irish and especially Irish-American culture: "Molly Malone," "Paddy's Lament," "Peggy Gordon," "The Parting Glass." She then proceeds to make one take them very seriously. Her ear is almost unerring, balanced perfectly between the whisper of a Celtic angel and the rasp of a Dublin street urchin. Wisely, she has also opted for restrained effects in her background music and electronic enhancements. Only "My Lagan Love" features a somewhat Trio-ish instrumentation balanced against O'Connor's trademark keening, with an effect that is goofy, melodramatic, and addictively over the top.

It's tribute both to Sinead's perversity and her solidity that she succeeds so well with chestnuts, finding in them an emotional range from the playful bitchiness of "Her Mantle So Green" to unforgettable sorrow on "Molly Malone." The riskiest tracks are those which have the greatest potential to showcase Sinead, the soap opera star with the operatic voice and ego to match. "Lord Baker" is a palpitatingly romantic epic about a Turkish princess who redeems the soul of an English aristocrat (and Sinead's exegesis of the ballad is something to read). "Oro, Si Do Bhaitha Bhaile" is a staple of Irish rebel mythology, honoring the female rebel Grace O'Malley. Both are custom-made for O'Connor, and both thus put her in the double bind of risking bathos with too lush a rendering but seeming to play it self-referentially safe with too much restraint. O'Connor errs on the side of restraint in both cases. On first listening, her interpretations of these songs seem so precise as to catch us in a loop: they're Sinead because they're so Irish, they're so Irish because they're so Sinead. It's on repeated listenings that they reveal their subtle layering, bringing us to a different sense of danger than we've been used to from Sinead. The danger is that of the Irish psyche's bondage to the past, compelled to act out the same dramas again and again, with variation only in the scars left on individual psyches. O'Connor's renderings of the CD's two most extroverted tracks act out this drama of enslavement to drama in a way that is both cathartic and claustrophobic: at the end, one feels at once purged and trapped. One could have wished for more, but on this first traditional CD, that may be asking too much.

Sinead's feminism deserves mention as the most consistent guiding force of the record, more often touched on than her Irish nationalism. It is hardly dialectical; it has a lot in common with Alice Walker's "womanism," applied to another culture where extreme sexism has coexisted for centuries with a knee-jerk matriarchal ethos. Ireland is Woman; women are its unacknowledged rulers; women are simply better and more relevant than men, who do a lot of damage but don't count for that much. It is not a feminism guaranteed to win favor with men in Ireland, who face day-to-day life in a society whose changes have not offered them such a clear way forward, and it should be mentioned that John Waters (father of Sinead's daughter) is now a spokesman for battered men in Ireland. That said, we can only judge Sinead O'Connor as an artist, and her cosmic maternalism is artistically satisfying though less satisfying politically.

Sean-Nos Nua Poster

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