zobovor's Full Review: Bury the Hatchet (The Complete Sessions 1998-99) [...
I was prepared, this time. You see, the last time I picked up a new cranberries album, I was heartily displeased with it. I decided, then, not to necessarily expect to enjoy Bury the Hatchet, but I wasn't exactly set out to hate it, either. Turns out I'm fairly neutral about it, actually.
The album, as a whole, hearkens back a bit to their first two albums, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? and No Need to Argue. The songwriting is decidedly less political and topical than what I would term their "issues" album, To the Faithful Departed, from 1996. Dolores O'Riordan is back to cooing in the trademark Irish tones that made her such a phenomenon to begin with. Unfortunately, the album is mixed horribly, with the harder instrumentation remeniscent of Faithful Departed drowning out the vocals on nearly every song.
•"Animal Instinct." The opening track is fairly ordinary; it's one of the featured songs as noted on the album cover. It's typical cranberries fare, with self-pitying lines like "do you know you made me cry, do you know you made me die?" Both the lyrics and instrumentation strike me as a bit formulaic; if you were a fan of the cranberries when they first debuted, this one will sound strangely familiar.
•"Loud and Clear." I rather like this one. The percussion, electric guitars, and bass all play of of each other in a way that gives the whole song a multi-layered feel. It's not very strong from a lyrical standpoint--and surprisingly spiteful for Dolores, ending with "Hope you get a puncture/ everywhere you ever drive/ hope the sun beats down on you and/ skin yourself alive." The upbeat tempo makes a nice juxtaposition for the song's attitude, although truth be told, it's hard to tell what the song is actually about without the lyric sheet. For some reason the backup vocals are a lot more loud and clear than the rest of Dolores' singing.
•"Promises." Another track that doesn't particularly do anything for me; it's a foreboding song about the inevitable breakup of a relationship when vows are thrown by the wayside. It's needlessly long--over five minutes. There's a bit of tongue-in-cheek attitude at work here, suggesting, "Maybe we should burn the house down/ have ourselves another fight/ leave the cobwebs in the closet/ 'cos tearing them out is just not right." There's nothing new here, either; the intermittent "do-do-do, do-do-do" between choruses may as well have been ripped stright from "Zombie" from No Need to Argue; once again, the guitars all but cover up O'Riordan's voice. There's some really obnoxious distortion during the chorus, too. Who mixed this one, anyway?
•"You and Me." Okay... not one of my favorites, but at least it sounds a lot more mellow and uplifting than most of the other tracks on this album. This one also has the essence of earlier cranberries work, though it smacks of a filler track. The song makes poor use of Dolores' vocal range (Ringo Starr could belt this one out with no trouble) and the lyrics are hardly inspiring--"Aahh, you and me will always be/ you and me forever be/ eternally it will always be..." etc. etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
•"Just My Imagination." Another one of the featured tracks, this song is about as devoid of content and musically empty as "Animal Instinct." It's got a fun little acoustic riff at the beginning of the song, then trails off into a melancholy bit about being carefree and "living not for reality." It's essentially a redux of "The Rebels" from Faithful Departed, only reflecting nostalgically instead of being wistfully tragic. Sort of "The Rebels Lite," really.
•"Shattered." Okay, this is much better. We've got the multi-layered instrument sounds of the acoustics and the violins and the vocals, which all blend together seamlessly. The vocal tracks themselves are layered over top one another to produce a very nice effect (Dolores sounds great when she serves as her own backup singer). To be quite honest, I'm not totally sure what the song is about. The opening lines, "I'm trying to control myself/ so please don't stand in my way" could be taken to mean any number of things, but "move over, move over/ there's a climax coming my way" doesn't leave much room for interpretation. Surprising content for the group, but the sound of the song is unmistakably cranberries.
•"Desperate Andy." Here's an off-beat number that's a bit harder that your average cranberries tune, throwing in some odd synthesized sounds--a watch ticking, glass breaking. It's about this fellow named Andy who clings to his girlfriend and appears to like that just fine; the song is really a showcase for Dolores' reverberating, very-Irish "re la la la la" refrain. Not sure I care much for the chorus--"The world is your oyster now/ so go out and get high and do whatever you want to." Not the best message, but hey...
•"Saving Grace." It's your basic cranberries love ballad with mind-numbingly repetitive lyrics ("and I can't wait to see your face/ no I can't wait to see your face," etc.) and a nice opportunity for Dolores to sing harmony with herself. The song is slow and romantic and Dolores' voice is soft and lovely as with "I Still Do" from the So Why Can't We? album. Nice stuff.
•"Copycat." This is perhaps the most perfunctory track on the album, with lines like "So much for the radio, everybody sounds the same/ everybody wears the same clothes now, and everybody plays the game." If there's a message here, I'm not getting it. Did somebody try to rip off one of the cranberries' songs at one point? Is this a commentary on teens trying to be trendy? In any event, it strikes me as another three minutes of filler.
•"What's On My Mind." It's pretty, it's mushy, it's largely pointless. I don't mean that in a bad way, of course; cranberries is supposed to be about silly, angsty love, to an extent. Not too much different from "Saving Grace," this song doesn't strike me as particularly inspired from a musical standpoint. The song is pleasing to the ear, but it's about as deep as a rain puddle.
•"Delilah." This song is almost note-for-note a rehash of the chorus from "I Just Shot John Lennon" from Faithful Departed. The strings accompaniment adds a little more depth, but otherwise it's an angry, bitchy rant at some gal named Delilah. Dolores wants her "out out out or I'll rearrange your face." This song is one of the worst in terms of the music obliterating the lyrics. Is she singing stop treading on my dreams, or stop dripping on my chest? What's the refrain at the end? Delilah, Delilah! Groceries! Groceries! I swear, that's what it sounds like.
•"Fe Fi Fo." If there were an "issue" song on the album, this would be it. You wouldn't know it without looking at the lyric sheet, but it's about a creep who likes to "get satisfaction from the body of a child." The song sounds to me like it's trying to be "The Icicle Melts" from No Need to Argue, at first, but it goes off in three or four mutually exclusive directions. The chorus is far too triumphant with its confident guitar riffs, given the subject matter. I do quite like the haunting, breathy vocals in between stanzas that Dolores does so well, in any event, as well as the way she breaks up the line, "God protect the ones who help themselves in their own way-ay-ay-ay-ay-yeah." Why isn't this the featured track?
•"Dying in the Sun." Our last track brings us full circle; like the song "No Need to Argue" from the album of the same name, Dolores O'Riordan's voice carries the song almost entirely. It's a peaceful little tune that borrows lyrics from a couple other songs. Is there an unwritten rule somewhere that every cranberries album must have a song that contains the phrase "do you remember"? Like "What's On My Mind," it's pretty much ear candy, but there's nothing particularly meaningful here.
As a devoted cranberries fan, I had to own the album regardless of what direction the group decided to go in this time. I'm quite pleased that Bury the Hatchet didn't inherit the dubious honor of being their worst album; To the Faithful Departed is the winner and still champion on that front. This is by no means their best offering, however, so it's at once a relief and a disappointment.
The sound mixing is really what bugged me, though. There's a little trick where if you listen to the album with headphones and pull the plug out of the jack about halfway, one of the stereo tracks doesn't come through all the way and the instrumentation is muted. That's the only way I can listen to the album and enjoy it, since I actually get to hear the singing of the vocalist that drew me to the cranberries in the first place.
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