Dolores O'Riordan
Are You Listening?

Dolores O'Riordan has a past as a fine jeweler. Whether she was shaping authentic diamonds ("No need to argue") or offering faded pearls ("Wake up and smell the coffee"), each of her creations could comfortably fall under the definition of "jewel." This "Are you listening?," however, feels a lot like costume jewelry. Cheap, to boot. The Cranberries have been dead for a while now, and the clever Dolores serves them up as jam to remind us who was the true mind behind that group that in the glorious nineties seemed to be more powerful and more famous than those other Irish bands, who suddenly started making crass dancefloor music. I wonder: is it permissible to review an album after just a few listens, or should one delve deeper and then engage in a more considered judgment, born of thoughtful reflection? But from this question arises another: why spend more time on an album that already seems to have nothing more to say after the first two listens? Ok, Dolores is always Dolores. From her genius and her (numerous) mood and personality changes came albums that are part of "history," whether you like them or not. Initially, a girl with high hopes and big ambitions ("Everybody else is doing it...") screamed without too much hesitation, then a woman destroyed by depression and anorexia ("To the faithful departed") who cared about the fate of the world, finally a happy and content mother. If at the beginning all these transformations resulted in valuable pieces (and also colorful hairstyles, to be honest), now Dolores seems to be stuck in the sugary goodness that marked the death of the Crans and the unexpected (but not so much) failure of their last studio album. This debut solo album continues along the lines of "Wake up and smell the coffee" with themes like family, children, love. Alright, fine, but those who remember (and loved) her as a haunting pagan icon, painted in gold and tremblingly warbling singing of mothers whose children are crushed by tanks in war... should avoid this CD. It's hard to recognize in these tracks' textures the O'Riordan of the past times, when every word was a boulder, a warning, a verdict. About the tracklist, there is little or nothing to say except that it follows a kind of sonorous swing that echoes the best Crans style ("When we were young" echoes the atmospheres of "To the faithful departed" so well that it's either the previous album that foreshadows it or she looked too far back) while "Stay with me" is all too clearly an offspring of "This is the day." Obviously, not everything is discarded indiscriminately, and with "Apple of my eye", the emotions a Cranberries fan expects arrive. A classic pop ballad well thought out and well constructed, and Dolores's voice is still heard in all its power and purity, which, to be honest, hasn't been lost despite the years. The same goes for "Angel fire" and "Loser" (although the intro of the latter reminded me unmercifully of Bon Jovi). Amidst these, a handful of pieces neither flesh nor fish (as someone might say); the radio single "Ordinary day" that has the trait of making you not want at all to get the album, I believe a rare case in today's music market; and some genuine insults to the audience's ears like the unlistenable "Black widow" and "Human spirit." The saving grace of this album remains the voice of Dolores O'Riordan, the same as always yet always different, capable of moving you even if she were singing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." Her voice can, depending on the case, emphasize or soften, become a rebuke or a promise and it's to this "instrument" that it seems one clings to make up for the album's shortcomings. Born from a very long gestation (four years after the very sad greatest hits of the Crans), it still seems to sound "incomplete". The true intentions of the artist are unclear, in fact. Perhaps she wanted to re-propose the ancient style that, to be fair, was more hers than that of the other band members? If so, she failed, perhaps having "forgotten" the formula for producing the jewels I referred to earlier. Instead, did she want to innovate, demonstrating that one can survive the success of the Cranberries and develop a personal project that doesn't suffer from that echo? We didn't get there, this sound is too halfway, too full of citations to sound different. I don't completely sink this work in my judgment only because I am happy to hear this voice again that brings with it my best emotions and my most beautiful memories, but something more should have been done. And meanwhile, those other Irish bands, take that disco clubs, megastar tours, windows in the sky, and electric storms... look down from above. Much, much higher.