Not for a nano-second do I believe this is Sinéad’s “farewell” album, but for the sake of peace and quiet, let’s pretend. The first half of the double-CD set She Who Dwells... is a generous 19-track helping of new material, demos, rarities and collaborations with Damien Dempsey, Massive Attack, Asian Dub Foundation, Brian Eno, Dave Stewart and others. The second CD is a live gig from Vicar St.
It takes but a few helpings of that fragile and emotion-laden voice to confirm that even if there’s more to come, this would be a more than fitting epitaph for a provocative career by an extraordinary artist with the capacity to say the unsayable while adapting, and adopting, countless musical genres and making them her own.
The sacred quality of that voice is instantly to the fore on the Gregorian hymns ‘Regina Caeli’ and ‘O Filii Et Filiae’ but is no less compatible with the more profane ‘Ain’t It A Shame’ or the upfront and unapologetic ‘Big Bunch Of Junkie Lies’ which may bring to some minds her alleged “grassing up” of Shane MacGowan. The demo for ‘Dense Water, Deeper Down’ dabbles deliciously in acid-country, while ‘This Is A Rebel Song’ is a celebratory Irish reggae strut. That sunny genre also creeps into ‘1000 Mirrors’ and ‘My Love I Bring’, and she truly transforms the soul classic ‘Do Right Woman’. The alternative take of the Eastern-spiced ‘Emma’s Song’ is an underrated gem, and ‘Song Of Jerusalem’ shows her voice at its most sumptuously warm.
But it’s not all perfect. ‘Love Hurts’ is lumbering and clumsy. Her version of Abba’s ‘Chiquitita’ is little more than superior karaoke while her take on Damien Dempsey’s ‘It’s All Good’ lacks the power of his own version.
The live set is a fair representation of the emotion and passion that are key elements in an O’Connor performance, and the highlights include an incendiary ‘Fire On Babylon’, a sublime ‘Thank You For Hearing Me’ and the inevitable ‘Nothing Compares To U’.
The few reservations aside, this is a fitting memorial to Sinéad’s relentless struggle to transcend the mundane, the vacuous and the predictable. As a farewell album it’ll do fine until the next one.