Bad air

That's a shame, because over the course of their last two albums the Cranberries have often been a difficult band to write off, even if you may have found it hard to bring yourself to like them. The lovely, wistful "Linger" floated weightlessly above the rest of the band's 1993 debut Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? It was a pop delicacy, but one with surprising staying power. And "Ode to My Family" (along with "Zombie," one of the standout tracks from 1994's No Need to Argue) hinted that O'Riordan just maybe would grow into a songwriter and singer capable of surprising subtlety and delicacy. She managed to convey perfectly the sense of missing the small-time place you came from rather than being thrilled you've escaped it. Even if you heard loud and clear the arty self-consciousness in the crisp timbre of O'Riordan's voice, if you knew deep in your heart that her clipped, precise phrasing smacked of affectation, those songs made you want to look the other way. Maybe her almost businesslike manner of repeating phrases, words, or sounds at the end of a line would in time turn out to be more of a trademark than a shtick. You could believe that maybe she really had something. It was going to be fun to wait and see.

And now we know. If To the Faithful Departed represents the new territory they're headed into, O'Riordan and her band are now officially unbearable. A small handful of songs try to pull the material in another direction. "When You're Gone" is a pretty, '50s-style ballad that opens with a chiffon-soft doo-wop line sung by O'Riordan. But by the time you've slogged through the whole CD, "When You're Gone" seems ridiculously out of place. Mostly, the Cranberries are out to run their politically aware bulldozer right over us; there's hardly a subtle bone in this album's body. The single "Salvation" is catchy as hell, driven by drummer Fergal Lawler's devilish, irresistible backbeat and dressed up with shiny-penny horn lines, but the words are enough to drive you to drink -- or worse: "To all the kids with heroin eyes, don't do it, don't do it/Because it's not what it seems, no it's not what it seems." And before we've even had a chance to thank O'Riordan for those shriveled doodies presented as wise counsel, she's on to the chorus. "Salvation is free," she assures us, smug as those know-it-all nuns you used to run into in Catholic schools, the ones who were always trying to cajole the potheads into going to folk mass.

Just like those nuns, "Bosnia" takes us all to task for not being aware enough of the world around us: "We live in our secure surroundings, and people die out there." Duh. But once O'Riordan's got a brand-new idea, she's just gotta run with it. "And we all sing songs in our room/Sarajevo erects another tomb." Joan Baez couldn't have trilled it any better.

There's more. "I Just Shot John Lennon" milks Lennon's death shamelessly under the guise of mourning him. (It actually ends with a tattoo of gunshots, a textbook instance of bad taste masquerading as dramatic effect.) And then there's the acoustic ballad "Warchild," whose title tells you all you need to know -- but just in case you're curious, it goes something like this: "War child, victim of political pride/Plant the seed, territorial greed/Mind the war child, we should mind the war child."

Well, we do mind the war child, Dolores -- terribly. We've all seen pictures of children in the newspapers or on television that break our hearts; the Cranberries reduce the unspeakable power of those pictures to formula (not to mention bad poetry). What in heaven's name are the Cranberries thinking? After suffering through a whole album full of this stuff, many of us are bound to find ourselves wondering if all this furrowed-brow concern is just another pose, if only because it's the single note that To the Faithful Departed keeps hammering on, over and over again. It's all so literal, so tear-jerking -- every idea is underlined in Magic Marker, just in case you don't get the concept. The Cranberries should be perfectly capable of folding their political views into their art without being this flatulently self-congratulatory. It looks like they just haven't figured out the difference between blowin' in the wind and breaking it.