Sinéad O’Connor - Lion and the Cobra
In a world that seeks perfection, masterpieces, guaranteed amazement without having to make an effort, I would prefer to say that at least in music one should take a humble approach, ending up even feeling embarrassed at not knowing how to handle beauty and depth, diversity and the inner climate created.
Then there are the moments when it becomes upheaval, torment, avalanches of freewheeling questions, landslides of the senses with the security of creating and experiencing an earthly bond, ready to become eternal. And when the notes, the words, the voices, the instruments make us experience all this, we become intimate, complicit, grateful, effervescent, seagulls in flight without a perimeter in the sky.
In 1987 an album was released that was capable of doing this, a door slammed in your face, with splendid pains colouring the walls of your heart with asbestos, with an energy that has never known exhaustion because perfection exists only in the way it rides time without going astray: Lion and the Cobra does this very well, like an eternal kiss from Apollo, God of music and art, who gave her approval to make this record the soundtrack to the days of a parallel paradise, which is specified in the possibility of giving space to torments, follies, exaggerations, multiple streams of propulsive consciousness.
These songs are dowsing arrows that seek to enter the listener's heart, without the need to find concord, but rather a new place to experience the effects caused by these nine different new drugs, in an afternoon that forgets itself and experiences effects: in the heart of the Old Scribe they still last today, thirty-nine years later.
Like a boat that rents out the history of an entire country and takes it on a voyage to faces that speak different languages, so does this work, a thunderous and deadly debut, an absurdity that creates devices for a chewing that will never give total joy, because this is not necessary: Sinéad does not heal wounds, she causes them in a delightful way, she shows us our naive, unconscious motions while we sleep and she takes care to wake us up, with tactics and planning that succeed in the objective.
She battles with herself, with demons, angels, real and fictitious characters, in an extraordinary crescendo for the craftsmanship of the writing and interpretation, within a truly vast apparatus, which bypasses the genes of musical genres and tunes into experimentation, with the resumption of attitudinal concepts from the past, shaking everything in the centre of her belly, the place of departure and distribution of her enormous sensitivity. Nothing is left to hypothesis, to calculation, everything is instead recorded to be put into the wind, the only way to ensure the possibility of a journey that can touch consciences. Her young age, at the time of writing the songs, did not prevent her from showing strength, compact ideas, multiple qualities, of succeeding in defining the missing, what in 1987, unconsciously, was expected, and this is precisely the greatest capacity: to give what one does not yet know one desires
A fairy disguised as a witch, fairy tales as the nightmare for crime news, psychological analysis that rush into memory, multiple extravaganzas capable of settling in the conscious, the unconscious that is stimulated to take a path: it is only the beginning, an infinitesimal part of what happens while what pulses, in listening, becomes a root, capable of descending into the depths, rebelling against conventions, using the direct language of sincerity, increasingly unbecoming for those who like to hide. She finds this mass and turns it upside down, with songs: what wonderful power is this?
We find the pelvic romanticism of an Ireland that knows how to escape the wear and tear of time, to remain unscathed and to be able to tell the stories that are passed down in a splendid habit, to accompany the days inside a green labyrinth, always fresh, bombastic, rotating, on a perpetual patrol, and does so through a folk sensibility that kisses rock, with sprinkles of electronics, contemplating petals of world music scattered under the skin, not renouncing to make people dance, with a head that is a smiling beehive, in search of space, creating and defining it. Adolescence, in the record, is a true, purposeful vibration, which settles well in the directions that continually move dreams and reality, always a metre further ahead.
She shouts, she whispers, she barks at the pentagram, she twists in her motions, she never lingers, she does not limp, she walks on notes as if in her DNA this was not a date but her home, always. Moving with ease, she dispenses pills of wisdom, contemplates a rebellion of the senses, overwhelms boredom with her freshness and colours the mind with many-feathered claws: she scratches and knocks our established habits out of our skin.
A prophetic, poetic, melancholic record, never wait-and-see, never willing to waste time and, with great humility, capable of showing cultural plans in search of a landing place, of new departures that with these tracks become obligatory. She does not allow indifference with this album, she drags us into the abyss by deceiving falsehood with her total sincerity. She disarms, putting flowers, ideas, strips of rebellion in the arms of our minds to contemplate, like a homework assignment never to be denied.
Lioness, cobra, but also chameleon, reindeer, cat, gazelle, golden eagle, dolphin, brown bear, ferret, in an endless list that shows the many souls walking among the verses, the ever-visible characters that fill the mental terrain full of grips, in a framework that defines the human jungle as the list goes on, making exchange with the animal world possible. And then there are mobile spirits, pressing in, authoritatively engaging, a reservoir of thoughts ready to spring to its feet.
And then her, the voice, a continuous miracle, a vibrant cascade of drops between the sweet and the bitter, which, injecting unquestionable technical skills, mould themselves in an extraordinary way in her feeling, in her outlining of words with continuous thrusts, in fascinating, touching ups and downs, ending up embellishing our mediocrity. A promenade, a procession of quality that knows no weakness, vivid, fulminating, sensual, an earthquake that shakes the eardrums and makes them useful in understanding that beyond the form there is an indisputable substance.
When she screams, groans, she seems to show us her childbirth at the moment when she can no longer hold back the body she has had inside her for a lifetime: a continuous birth, with sweat resting on her vocal cords trained to sweep away indifference and nourish astonishment.
Her nature is overflowing, she advances, she seizes, she blesses, she asks for help, she turns her back on stupidity, she confronts cruelty, she plunges her devotion into the love that has wounded her and she, like a wise angel, knows how to transform it, how to erect it on a meritocratic plane.
She sows, she ignites, she pulverises, she waits, she shows disenchantment and mistrust, she nurtures doubts, and she gets on the chariot of commitment by tackling urgent issues, she paralyses the useless and becomes Goddess without fear, christening winged experiments to teach us new flights.
It sounds, this incredible debut, like a classic that attaches itself to modernity, often announcing a future that will not be long in coming, in order to converse (dutifully not always in a positive way) with a reality that does not realise that it is also the task of art to act as a metronome, a pointer, an advisor, a paperwork, so as not to waste time. The personal dissatisfaction of her first recordings allowed her to take total control, like a necessary anti-democratic flux: cunning, skill, a furious temperament, the shrewdness of a gauge to measure tensions, spasms and sweetnesses always lurking, in search of a timbre that would make all opposition crumble. It was a battle for her that time but she won it, she took the songs and nailed them, along with those who did not understand them, in the part where victory always has a fiercely satisfied grin.
And when the voice visualises the images, with the support of music that overrides any reluctance, we find ourselves enveloped in a mantle full of slippery moss, like the result of a rainy day fast-acting on our beats. When she sings the caves feel dismay: she has uncovered them and plunged electric wires into them, disrupting the walls. Often rejecting traditions that she deems superfluous, she puts slush into her thoughts like soft balls of wool, but one gets the impression that the explosions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are always present in her. Tranquillity absolutely does not live in her head, which sprouts and scatters neuroses without fear of contradiction.
Her passion for music becomes an electric chair. She kills what pop uses to embellish a ridiculous and superfluous space, and drags it into the exercise of songs built with arrangements that alone would displace the most narcissistic of artists, shining the methodology of a polyvalent writing, attached to the expression that must contain discipline and rules. A punk that does not use punk to oppose but rather imagination, research: the middle finger creeps in the bitter waves of continual travails, with an anger that does not become an outlet but a clod of earth in the sky.
She is a godmother to Lisa Germano, Fiona Apple, Pj Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Liz Phair, Dolores O'Riordan: she teaches them all something, because it is undeniable that Sinéad's freedom has paid a very high personal price, and an imprint capable of spreading in the consciences of these singers, beyond musical styles. The Irish artist has brought as a gift qualities that have compacted in the macroscope of others' consideration, becoming a peasant woman who has sown her seeds in the territories of others.
If we start from the title, from the cover, we are immediately catapulted into history, into religion, into modernity in glittering colours, finding on the way wars, hatred, twisted fairy tales, explosive mixtures of layered consciousnesses, with allegories, phosphorescent images, settings that make convictions creak, attacks on politics in the hands of politicians and not citizens, sentimental relationships where terror and lies do not stop making people shed tears, with the incredible surprise of seeing her handle it all with grace and respect. Far from a masterpiece: here she has gone further, where there are no right words to specify and assert. One can only say Thank you and continually bow one's head to learn, without getting distracted...
And now we mourn for this record, not for its demise: in this album lies its immortality, which could, as a consequence, also be ours...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
25th April 2024
