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~ Sinead O'Connor
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~ Sinead O'Connor
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~ Sinead O'Connor
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~ Sinead O'Connor
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~ Sinead O'Connor
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Released two years after she tore up a picture of the Pope on prime-time US television, this is O'Connor's fourth and most fully-realised album. Intensely spiritual, it burns with anger, passion and a fragile beauty. Opening with a call to arms by feminist writer Germaine Greer, the album then moves into the sultry groove of "Fire On Babylon", O'Connor's chilling song about her experience of child abuse. In the tradition of rap music as education, she mixes Celtic folk with hip-hop beats on the track "Famine", a tough-talking tribute to Irish history complete with samples from Miles Davis and Fiddler On The Roof; while pared-down ballads such as "John I Love You" and "Thank You For Hearing Me" are soaring yet simple hymns to the rejuvenating power of love. She even does an intimate version of Nirvana's song "All Apologies". More poised and reflective than previous albums, Universal Mother shows vision and musical maturity. As O'Connor suggests in the sleeve notes, it is heard best "on headphones (and) ... in sequence, rather than as single tracks." --Lucy O'Brien
CD Description
Sinead O'Connor has transcended much of the pain and anger of her public persona with this moody, evocative set of songs. Touching upon themes of fraternity and maternity with folkish grace and childlike metaphors, O'Connor's UNIVERSAL MOTHER reveals aspects of her longings and fears in cryptic freeze frames of song and sorcery that are haunting in their simplicity, and unsettling in their focus on doomed innocents.
Consecrated to the world's mothers and children, and dedicated "as a prayer from Ireland", UNIVERSAL MOTHER opens with an invocation from Germaine Greer, and the ominous overture "Fire In Babylon". With its menacing bassline and swirling mix of jazz samples and keyboards, it echoes Peter Gabriel, P.I.L. and Robert Fripp with its portents of dissolution and doom ("Life's backwards/People turn it around/The house is burned...The children are gone".). The penultimate "Famine" acts as a psychic bookend. Following a wolf's cry and an echo of "Fiddler On The Roof", the arrangement lurches forward with a hip hop collage of Miles Davis and the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby", as O'Connor's narrative essays the destructionof Irish culture and history.
In between, O'Connor's intimate confessionals are framed in folkish piano accompaniments, with spare brushstrokes of strings. From the tender "My Darling Child", to a poignant cover of Kurt Cobain's "All Apologies", O'Connor's dark chamber music focuses on the joys and heartaches of childhood, scary tales of abuse, alientation from her family, and other painful rites of passage. UNIVERSAL MOTHER is an enigmatic, deeply personal portrait of the artist in flux--a triumph of compassion over rage.
Consecrated to the world's mothers and children, and dedicated "as a prayer from Ireland", UNIVERSAL MOTHER opens with an invocation from Germaine Greer, and the ominous overture "Fire In Babylon". With its menacing bassline and swirling mix of jazz samples and keyboards, it echoes Peter Gabriel, P.I.L. and Robert Fripp with its portents of dissolution and doom ("Life's backwards/People turn it around/The house is burned...The children are gone".). The penultimate "Famine" acts as a psychic bookend. Following a wolf's cry and an echo of "Fiddler On The Roof", the arrangement lurches forward with a hip hop collage of Miles Davis and the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby", as O'Connor's narrative essays the destructionof Irish culture and history.
In between, O'Connor's intimate confessionals are framed in folkish piano accompaniments, with spare brushstrokes of strings. From the tender "My Darling Child", to a poignant cover of Kurt Cobain's "All Apologies", O'Connor's dark chamber music focuses on the joys and heartaches of childhood, scary tales of abuse, alientation from her family, and other painful rites of passage. UNIVERSAL MOTHER is an enigmatic, deeply personal portrait of the artist in flux--a triumph of compassion over rage.
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