Tonights selections from Sinéad O'Connor’s eighth album, 2005’s Throw Down Your Arms.
When she first leapt into the limelight in the late ’80s, she came on as Kate Bush gone to boot camp: head shaved and shrouded in the anger and mythology of songs “Troy” and “Mandinka.” Barely 20 years old in 1987 (when she produced her debut, The Lion and The Cobra) she helped pave the way with her feral vocals and aggressive demeanor for female artists that followed in her wake such as Liz Phair, Alanis Morrissette and Fiona Apple. O’Connor’s 1990 release, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got revealed a more vulnerable side and brought her a wider audience. The tears she shed in her video of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” struck a chord with the masses, who responded by making it #1 on the Billboard charts for eight weeks. Through a simple close up of her face, O’Connor conveyed an intensity and empathy not seen since the days when Tammy Faye Bakker’s mascara ran all over her poodle. It remains one of her most enduring images or would have, until things began to go awry. [...]
Throw Down Your Arms, her latest release, is an impeccably executed album of classic roots reggae tunes. Recorded at the legendary Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, and produced by Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the album plays like a seamless rasta celebration to Jah, the most high. The opener, “Jah Nuh Dead”, is stripped down to its a-cappella gospel bones before the band plunges into the dread groove of Burning Spear’s militant “Marcus Garvey.” Lee “Scratch” Perry’s tender “Curly Locks”, is a “Waiting In Vain” style ballad in the Marley tradition, warmed up with organ and a smooth sax solo that floats feather-like above the rhythm. — Pop Matters
Jah Nuh Dead
Okay, let's be up front: Your appreciation of this album will be directly tied to how seriously you can take the idea of Sinead O'Connor singing reggae. No one debates that O'Connor can sing. Nellie Hooper's barely-there backing of "Nothing Compares 2 U" throws her quivering, gorgeous voice right up in your ear. Also, no one should doubt her love of this music; don't forget that when she pulled the crazy pope-ripping stunt on Saturday Night Live it was to the tune of Bob Marley's "War". And reggae, the most non-secularized pop music on the planet, often chapter-and-verse on record, is an apt vehicle for a woman who left music in order to become an ordained priest in a non-traditional Catholic denomination.
And Throw Down Your Arms is certainly authentic. It was recorded at the Marley's Tuff Gong studios in Kingston, and produced by Sly & Robbie, one of the five or 10 most smoking rhythms sections ever, in or out of reggae. And here's the thing you're probably most worried about: no, she doesn't sing it in cod-patois. Her voice is the same as always, that ringing, lilting Irish clarity. So thank God (or Jah) for small favors and good taste. Anyway, it's hard to fuck up a song like Peter Tosh's "Downpressor Man", and O'Connor doesn't. The band gets deep in the pocket, bass and drums on equal footing with voice as with actual reggae, and O'Connor sticks mostly to fire and brimstone roots like Burning Spear's "Door Peep" and the hectoring anthropomorphism of Lee Perry's "Vampire". She stretches out on Perry's charming "Curly Locks", made famous by Junior Byles, a sweet tale of a dreadlocks in love with a girl whose father will let her having nothing to do with him. — Pitchfork
Marcus Garvey
When it comes to supplying great records by Western acts, the Caribbean sojourn has a decidedly ropy history - consider (briefly) the ragged, reggaefied offerings of the Stones, Ian Dury, Paul McCartney and Joe Cocker. By contrast, Sinead O'Connor's pilgrimage to Jamaica has delivered a pearl of an album, a dozen cover versions that pay homage to reggae's golden age in the Seventies.
The directness of O'Connor's approach has a lot to do with the success of Throw Down Your Arms, its title borrowed from one of five Burning Spear songs here. Far from hanging out, hoping for inspiration, she has stayed as close to the originals as possible, citing, in her liner notes, a dictum from opera diva Maria Callas: 'The composer has already taken care of everything. Just do exactly as the composer has written.' With Sly and Robbie producing - and for once not on the auto-pilot the rhythm twins customarily engage for visitors - the results are clean, lively takes of hallowed sides by Spear, Marley, Abyssinians, Israel Vibration et al. [...]
There is, as always with the elfin O'Connor, a moral message at play, what she calls 'saving God from religion', which is why this crazy ex-Catholic girl (and schismatically ordained priestess) is spreading the 'message of Rastafari'. The appeal of Vatican-baiting Rastafari to a woman who ripped up the Pope's picture on US TV is obvious enough, though one can imagine dreadlocked ideologues being none too taken with Sinead's prayers to the 'Universal Mother'. Suffice to say that the music has its own spirit, and one that should be in full, wild cry in her forthcoming live shows with Sly and Robbie. — The Guardian
Vampire
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Throw Down Your Arms
Sinead O’Connor’s Throw Down Your Arms is a recording of songs with spiritual and social themes, a recording of reggae songs. Sinead O’Connor’s singing of these songs is invested with affirmation, warning, testimony, flirtation, and sighs, as if expressing different parts of her being and consciousness. The musicians working with her, some of whom played on the original recordings of these songs, are excellent. [...] Throw Down Your Arms is a respectful and sincere tribute, and a lovely piece of music, but except for the respect—cross-cultural, intergenerational, beyond gender—it represents, it is not radical or transformative. Such a comment may be suggesting an impossible standard. It might be simpler if I just said that I like the album very much: without having any inclination to affirm the recording’s view of god-centered spirituality or nationalistic politics, I enjoy the album’s singing and music very much.
In the song “Jah Nuh Dead,” the lyrics repeat that the universal deity remains alive, and in “Marcus Garvey,” that Garvey is still a relevant prophet, and the lyric in “Door Peep” advises the listener to “chant down Babylon,” which may not be possible. Can a song or a poem change the world? Can the truth in a song or a poem change the world? The songs “He Prayed,” “Y Mas Gan,” “Vampire,” “Prophet Has Arise,” and “Untold Stories” are included on the album Throw Down Your Arms. “Curly Locks,” about a personal association despite parental disapproval, is sensual, light, affectionate, pretty, and girlish. “Downpressor Man” is a searing rebuttal to a corrupt ruler, a criminal, saying that even nature will work against him: “if you run to the sea, the sea will be boiling.” O’Connor’s voice is forceful: accusation becomes her, as does denunciation. There are not many singers who can move easily between the girlish and the prophetic. — Compulsive Reader
Prophet Has Arise
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