By Paul Iiams
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday December 5, 2002
Sean-N—s Nua Vanguard Records
By all appearances, SinŽad O'Connor has calmed down.
Gone is the controversial pope's-picture-ripping shaved head źberstar. It's just too bad she's gone.
In her place is a quiet, introspective soulful singer - complete with hair. In O'Connor's, latest effort Sean-N—s Nua, she regales the listener with folk tunes from her childhood and ancestry in Ireland.
Ireland must be an awfully dreadful place.
Every song is a labor to listen to. Long, slow, ballads that seem to be about nothing but lost love and death make the album seem twenty times longer than it actually is. Even the child's skipping song "I'll Tell Me Ma," gives off the aura of desperation, like something the children would sing right before drinking poison-laced Kool-aid.
The only saving grace of the album is O'Connor herself. If anyone else were to sing these songs, they might have been unbearable. But the power and raw emotion that O'Connor brings elevates the album to passable.
O'Connor especially lets her voice shine through in "Peggy Gordon" and "Lord Franklin." Both songs are about lost loves.
In "Gordon," an ode to homosexual love, she paints a picture of losing the love of your life and how it is traumatic to everyone. In "Franklin," a song about Irish explorer John Franklin, she lets the listener in on the pain being felt by John's wife Jane, who is waiting for his return.
O'Connor mentions in the CD jacket that she has been dying to make this record all of her life. I am thinking maybe she should have waited a little longer.
