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Oh, how soon they forget. O'Connor was already a major, Grammy-nominated "star" with a multi-platinum album ('Lion & Cobra') and a slew of international Modern Rock hit singles even before her freakishly mesmerizing crossover success with the Prince "cover" (Nothing Compares 2 U) in 1990.
Then, she protested institutional child-abuse in the RC Church in 1992 by "shredding" a little piece of paper on SNL, and two years later she gave "birth" (one would think literally) to this album, which cracked the Billboard Top 40 and made critics & fans churn with praise. The disc went-on to shift a couple of million units, and it's easy to see why O'Connor retained such a huge audience even after enormous controversy and boycott.
Like the gorgeous, ineffable Joni Mitchell, O'Connor steadfastly bucked every "standard" and did so brilliantly with this little "number." This album is the quintessential definition of an "album." 'Universal Mother' is a song-cycle of great pretension and bombast and harrowing vulnerability, but only a singer-songwriter like O'Connor (or perhaps the divine Mitchell, for that matter) could have pulled something like this "off."
Her opener, 'Fire on Babylon' is still one of the most scorchingly weird pieces of "protest-brilliance" ever committed to record. You've got loads of Sinead-ammunition with nuances of Peter Gabriel, some Kate Bush, some Joni, and SERIOUS funk-fusions that *nobody* was doing at the time. Forget boundaries; this chick was so outside-the-box that she created her own box. And it worked. The song still gives anyone with a soul the heebie-jeebies (or ought to). Then, O'Connor (after dropping the musical equivalent of a nuke), starts dusting and doing a 'Mother Teresa' amid the fallout with "John I Love U"--a waltz!!! Up next? Well, you have bared fangs about women's reproductive rights on 'Red Football' and the spookiest cover of Cobain's 'All Apologies' that is ever likely to be put down. 'Nuff said.
It only gets more chilling: stormy Irish seas and magically-transformed swan-people press against the brain with 'Perfect Indian,' wherein O'Connor sings of suicide and mythology with the kind of vocal clarity that could not only shatter a window-pane, but scour-it-clean beforehand.
A gut-wrenching cover of Ralph McTell's "Scorn Not His Simplicity" (stark piano-ode to a Downs-Syndrome Child's struggle to be loved) sets-up the blood-curdlingly Gothic 'All Babies' and then segues toward one of the most utterly original, brilliant, hair-raisingly rendered Irish "tradtionals" in history...only it wasn't "traditional" (O'Connor wrote & performed it for the album). Go figger.
A greasy, drop-dead sincere "rap" about the real origin of the Irish Potato Famine comes next (with the recurrent theme of nation-as-mother, mother-as-mother, Reason-as-mother) and then the elegiac hip-hop of 'Thank You 4 Hearing Me'--a soaring hymn loaded with Tim Simenon's ultra-funk that became a massive hit for Sinead in Europe, after USA radio had long refused to play her singles.
The whole thing is an opera, and O'Connor (being one of the true few who really deserves the legit title of "diva") constructs this record as a total drama from which she deftly blasts, bickers, belts, brays, bleats...and then caresses, careens, cuddles, and croons a spellbinding tale of "motherhood" is bracing, to say the least.
It's also probably the best record you forgot to buy, from the '90s.
The fact that it sold so well, two years after O'Connor had chucked-up her mainstream superstardom, is a testament to how extremely good was this disc. It does, indeed, remind me of some of Joni Mitchell's opuses (and some BIG time Nina Simone, honey!)...wherein O'Connor was blithely not afraid to throw the curviest of balls and make it all astonishingly SUPREME, in the end.
This is one of those records. The amazing thing about O'Connor is that she went-on to "rule" according to her own terms, with albums like this...just outside the spotlight, but big-selling and earth-shattering. Listen to this--start-to-finish--and see if you don't get the proverbial goosebumps. A classic for its daring fusion & experimentalism alone, and no mistake.
A Desert Island disc for the "Voice" and the passion, as usual.
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Top reviews from other countries
Decipher Angst Enami
"Sinéad O'Connor Sublime."
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2020
