Sinéad O'Connor: Broken Spells

Emotional singing isn't simply a matter of spilling your guts, and no one offers better proof than Sinéad O'Connor. From her first album, The Lion and the Cobra (Ensign/Chrysalis, 1987), her extraordinary technique has been offered in the service of emotional drama -- a voice that could negotiate whiplash rhythms and octave leaps in quick syllables, at once vulnerable and indomitable. What's more, she was capable of so many sounds: high nasal head tones and constrained whispers, back-of-the-throat glottal cello tones, rock-and-roll yelps. These were never mere technical effects -- songs like her "Three Babies" and "Last Day of Our Acquaintance" and her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U" were full of narrative shadings, chilling episodes.

Which is why if you go to a Sinéad O'Connor concert and your eyes don't well with tears at least once, you might be tempted to ask for your money back. Sinéad is touring on the slim six-song Gospel Oak (Chrysalis/EMI), her first release since 1994's Universal Mother. The new material is subdued and, in its way, beautiful, the sound of traditional Irish airs more pronounced than ever. (In fact, one of the best tracks on it is a version of a traditional ballad, here "He Moved Through the Fair," with its dream imagery and mysterious lover.) But her songs, and her singing, on evidence of the new CD and her show at Harborlights Pavilion last Thursday (August 28), are more generic, less surprising these days, without much of the old spine-tingling, eye-filling chill.

At Harborlights, she was backed by a six-piece band (including keyboards, replete with Irish pipe effects, and cello) and a four-woman back-up chorus (Donegal's the Screaming Orphans, who opened the show with peppy folk rock and tension-filled stacked vocal harmonies). Many of the old songs were there, but not a lot of the color. The opening "The Emperor's New Clothes" (from 1990's pivotal I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got), full of domestic tension, was little more than a bouncy guitar rocker. Other early songs were similarly flattened. The arrangements didn't always help. "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance" is moving for its depiction of bleak isolation -- the singer and her departed lover are the only actors. Letting the Screaming Orphans chime in after a verse or so at Harborlights did nothing but break the spell. (It also didn't help that O'Connor communicated with the audience after each song chiefly with a shy, giddy "Thank yooo!" that sounded annoyingly like Minnie Pearl shouting "How doooo!")

The songs from Universal Mother celebrate the goddess and all that good stuff, but there's plenty of tension there, too (no one makes the personal political, and vice versa, better than O'Connor). At Harborlights, she sang several of the album's love songs, but she achieved most of her effects through shifts in volume -- there were none of her chiaroscuro touches. A convincing political diatribe like "Fire on Babylon" worked best when she unleashed mighty, long high-note, pitch-perfect cries of "Fire!", sounding the alarm, trying to wake up Ireland and the world. It was telling that one of the most effective pieces of the night wasn't even sung -- it was the rapped "Famine."

Maybe this was just an off night. Certainly some of the lyrics on Gospel Oak have the old Sinéad sting ("Your rage is like a fist in my womb," from "This IS A Rebel Song"). But the most emotional pure singing may have been of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," and there it came in the way she varied Marley's breathy invocation of "the Almighty" with her own gentle, pure-toned resignation. When she's on, O'Connor can access an audience's emotions as readily as her own.

-- Jon Garelick