Sinéad O'Connor - Universal Mother (1994)

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Sinéad O'Connor - Universal Mother (1994)

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Sinead O'Connor has transcended much of the pain and anger of her public persona with this moody, evocative set of songs. Touching upon themes of fraternity and maternity with folkish grace and childlike metaphors, O'Connor's UNIVERSAL MOTHER reveals aspects of her longings and fears in cryptic freeze frames of song and sorcery that are haunting in their simplicity, and unsettling in their focus on doomed innocents.

Consecrated to the world's mothers and children, and dedicated "as a prayer from Ireland," UNIVERSAL MOTHER opens with an invocation from Germaine Greer, and the ominous overture "Fire In Babylon." With its menacing bassline and swirling mix of jazz samples and keyboards, it echoes Peter Gabriel, P.I.L. and Robert Fripp with its portents of dissolution and doom ("Life's backwards/People turn it around/The house is burned…The children are gone."). The penultimate "Famine" acts as a psychic bookend. Following a wolf's cry and an echo of "Fiddler On The Roof," the arrangement lurches forward with a hip hop collage of Miles Davis and the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby," as O'Connor's narrative essays the destruction of Irish culture and history.

In between, O'Connor's intimate confessionals are framed in folkish piano accompaniments, with spare brushstrokes of strings. From the tender "My Darling Child," to a poignant cover of Kurt Cobain's "All Apologies," O'Connor's dark chamber music focuses on the joys and heartaches of childhood, scary tales of abuse, alientation from her family, and other painful rites of passage. UNIVERSAL MOTHER is an enigmatic, deeply personal portrait of the artist in flux–a triumph of compassion over rage.

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Sinéad O'Connor - Universal Mother (1994)

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On Universal Mother, Sinéad O'Connor tells us more about herself than we probably should know. It's record making as therapy, the byproduct of feelings still only half worked out, a bundle of self-revelations left suspended, twisting in the wind. It wobbles between being an awful record and a remarkable one, and maybe that's why it works: It swings so wildly that it never sinks into that deathly muddy middle ground.

More than half the songs on Universal Mother sound so tenderhearted, you could almost close your ears to the rage marbled through them. The most openly rancorous songs are actually the least affecting: The simmered wrath of "Red Football" is botched by an unintentionally goofy beer-hall-from-hell chorus, and the political rant "Famine" can't match the charring intensity of "Black Boys on Mopeds," from O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (1990).

But O'Connor isn't just draining her wounds here. The record is raw but in a buffed, alabaster way: It's built largely on delicate piano-based arrangements, with an occasional lanky groove worked in. What's more, O'Connor fights against fixating too much on her own troubled psyche. A handful of songs deal squarely with the kind of cruelty a mother can inflict on her child ("She's taken everything I liked"), but an even bigger handful reinforce O'Connor's protectiveness of every child's childhood. The lullaby "My Darling Child" threatens to turn treacly, but when O'Connor addresses her kid as both "me little street fighter" and "me little lamby," you realize how desperately she's trying to arm him for battle with a terrible world.

Junior psychoanalysts will have a field day with Universal Mother, trying to untangle lines like "You were born on the day my mother was buried" as if they were Chinese puzzles. But less important than what O'Connor says is how she says it. Her rage is distilled in droplets, finding its way through her tissue-fragile voice like blood seeping through gauze. She's not falling apart on this record — she's holding herself together — and it's infinitely more terrifying that way.

Review by Stephanie Zacharek, Rolling Stone

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Sinéad O'Connor - Universal Mother (1994)

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Sinéad O'Connor - Universal Mother (1994)

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