Thursday, March 29, 2012

SINÉAD O’CONNOR – HOW ABOUT I BE ME (AND YOU BE YOU)?

 

 

How About I Be Me (And You Be You)_

 

As famous as she's been over the past 25 years for her incredible voice and confessional song writing, Sinead has also made a name for herself by using the world stage as a therapist's couch. Some folks are content to resolve their dilemmas in private, but Sinead has acted them out all-too publicly. If you didn't know her music, you could easily dismiss Sinead as a publicity-grabbing nut with a big ego. But in point of fact, she's an artist of breathtaking power and originality, as demonstrated by HOW ABOUT I BE ME AND YOU BE YOU. There's too much wisdom, insight and humour in these new songs to disparage her character or focus on her extra-musical activities for very long.

HOW ABOUT I BE ME is an astonishing record -- honest, heartbreaking, scathing, hilarious and ultimately deeply compassionate. Its songs explores various facets of sexual and romantic obsession and delusion, drug addiction, hypocrisy and other "lightweight" topics that Sinead is famous for. Sinead has great lyrical command of vernacular, spoken language as well as uncanny psychological insight. The stories she tells throb with irony, profanity and pathos.

Using the first person, Sinead serves up her characters' ambivalent and messy lives for our consideration. They teeter between out-of-control desires, false hope and self-denial on one side, and guilty self-reproach and painful awareness on the other. There's the thoroughly untrustworthy junkie ("Reason with Me"), who admits to stealing your T.V. but then reveals a darker truth: "I don't like no one around me/ `Cause if I loved someone, I might lose someone"; the unwed mother who grapples with shame and guilt while recalling the exciting sexual encounter with the father ("I Had A Baby"), and the pining woman who knows her infatuation with a married man is "uncool" but insists that they'll be together in the future ("Old Lady"). In the smashing opener, "4th & Vine," the narrator is a starry-eyed woman getting dressed for her wedding. Utilizing every cliché in the pop lexicon, plus some lovely unexpected phrases too, she sings "I'm gonna marry my love, and we'll be happy for all time." The irony is implicit, but there's so much optimism in the delivery that it's impossible not to root for her impossible dream.

In a different vein, nobody can rant like Sinead, and on several tracks ("Take Off Your Shoes," "Queen of Denmark" and "V.I.P.") she takes us down her dark road of righteous rage, directed towards herself and others.

In case you think it's all bleak, take heart. Sinead just got very publicly married, separated and reconciled. A few songs here reflect her ongoing faith in love. "The Wolf Is Getting Married" and "Back Where You Belong" probably represent Sinead as she sees herself today: a woman very experienced in the pitfalls of relationships who is prepared, with eyes open, to make a life with a man.

As charged as her lyrics are, what makes this record work is the musically diverse crazy quilt of styles she employs throughout. Because of the great production values and variety, HOW ABOUT I BE ME passes a "repeated listenings test" with flying colours. You want to listen to these songs again, and again. Sinead writes a great hook and weaves her conversational lyrics into well-constructed phrases and arrangements. With her producer, John Reynolds, she's come up with a mélange of rock, hip-hop, ska, electronic, and pop elements made cohesive by her wonderful singing. She's lost a little bit of the top of her range -- she tends to switch back and forth between full voice and a whisper as she sings higher -- but she's lost none of the expressive force of her voice overall.

If there's an overarching theme to this album, it's that we are, each of us, a bundle of contradictory impulses vying for dominance in a chaotic landscape of obsessions, desires and higher purpose. She could have titled the album "Angles and Demons," but that would be much too obvious. Instead, she asks: how about I be me, and you be you? Let's put all our crazy on the table without judgment, examine it from all sides until it loses its power to hurt us, and just love each other anyway.

Track Listing:
1 of 11 ~ 4th and Vine
2 of 11 ~ Reason With Me
3 of 11 ~ Old Lady
4 of 11 ~ Take Off Your Shoes
5 of 11 ~ Back Where You Belong
6 of 11 ~ The Wolf Is Getting Married
7 of 11 ~ Queen of Denmark
8 of 11 ~ Very Far from Home
9 of 11 ~ I Had a Baby
10 of 11 ~ V.I.P.
11 of 11 ~ I Am Stretched On Your Grave (Live at Iceland Airwaves Festival 10.14.11)

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