Album review: Sinéad O’Connor - How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?

THERE’S never a dull moment when Sinéad O’Connor is in full flow, but these last few months have been eventful even by her chaotic standards. What might have been a peaceful lead up to the release of her first new album in five years turned into her most bizarre and attention-seeking episode yet at the end of last year when she advertised for a man on Twitter, embarked on a whirlwind romance, got hitched in Vegas, then promptly jeopardised her marriage when she attempted to score some weed on her wedding night. Her new husband is a drug counsellor. You just couldn’t make it up.

After three marriages, very public criticism of the Catholic Church and her own mother, ordination into the priesthood, conversion to Rastafarianism, coming out, going back in again and her ongoing struggle with mental illness, O’Connor is well used to being disliked, even vilified, for her outspoken beliefs and to scoring headlines for all the wrong reasons.

But since the start of the year she has contemplated suicide, resumed taking the tablets, locked her Twitter account and re-united with her husband for a second time. No wonder she sounds dog-tired of the soap opera herself when she sings “let me create something other than trouble” on the track Very Far From Home, tapping into the simple serenity of Nanci Griffith or Emmylou Harris in her delivery. Even the album title – How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? – sounds like a shrug for tolerance, the only response she has left following all the tears, tantrums, dramas and controversies.

The great – and very pleasant – surprise about her ninth album is how focused and cohesive it sounds for being conceived against such a background of bedlam. This surely is a healthier way to arrest the attention, with her considered yet fearless songwriting and instantly recognisable and athletically expressive voice.

The subject matter is less of a surprise, as O’Connor tackles the highs and lows of love, institutional child abuse, parenthood and hypocrisy. Given the potential weight of her themes, it is unexpected to hear her in such breezy spirits on the light, perky Afrobeat opener, 4th and Vine, on which she outlines love’s young dream (“I’m going to marry my love and we’ll be happy for all time”) in coquettish though not so innocent girl group terms, trilling “I do” and “I will” like a lovestruck schoolgirl.

Her other love songs – current single The Wolf Is Getting Married and Old Lady – are easier to overlook with their mediocre musical arrangements, though the latter is a touching piece of wistful wishfulness, in which she pictures herself contented in years to come, having weathered her current travails.

She sets aside her girlish impulses and composes herself for the emotionally sober drugs lament Reason With Me, in which the protagonist catalogues her felonious behaviour (“I even pulled the odd hijack, said I had a hypodermic in my backpack”) and feels her way to redemption (“it’s not too late to reason with me”).

O’Connor does a fine job of modulating her tone to suit the story, and she offers another couple of decent character studies, occupying the role of a single mum, deserted by her married lover, and capturing her mix of defiance, joy and regret as completely as Kate Bush or PJ Harvey would on I Had A Baby. Back Where You Belong, meanwhile, is a heartfelt missive to a son, delivered with a breathy catch in her voice over undulating guitars and the pattering of a martial drumbeat.

So far, so understated, until she covers John Grant’s Queen of Denmark, which genuinely sounds like something she might have written herself. O’Connor throws herself wholeheartedly into its savage wit, allowing herself to come unhinged so effectively that it puts most of her own material in the shade.

But she reserves her most devastating rage for the Catholic Church’s handling of child abuse. O’Connor has always been one of their most tenacious accusers and on Take Off Your Shoes she addresses the authorities like a malevolent spirit: “behold at the last lamplight, at the very end of your street, I’m whispering something”. Her quiet but incandescent anger threatens to bubble over into outright wrath but is more powerful for being kept on a leash – a lesson Florence Welch could learn in harnessed power.

Later, she challenges her peers on the bare but eloquent folk hymn VIP, which closes the album by asking “wasn’t it in history, the artist always spoke their people’s needs?” Its whispered coda sounds like a dire Biblical prophecy, but is punctured by laughter in the room at the end. Thank goodness Sinéad O’Connor still knows how to have a laugh.

Rating: ***