The Cranberries
Bury the Hatchet

THE REVIEW

What do you feel when the bittersweet memories of adolescence return, seeming current, even though they are not?

You feel like you're still in the same situation, in the same place, and with the same feelings/sensations, or almost.

For me, 'Bury The Hatchet' by the Cranberries is the Western video of 'Promises' that often played in snippets on 'Superclassifica' with Vanessa Incontrada on Italia Uno, every Sunday at lunchtime.

That was an imperceptible reason for interest, which later became attention in October, after that summer, with the video recalling images of the 'Brimful of Asha' group by Cornershop, 'Just my imagination'.

And also the song, of course: in December '99, for my 17th birthday, I bought 'Bury the Hatchet'.

And when I played the CD, bit by bit, that album, and then the previous discography of the group (recorded on tape thanks to the loans of CDs from an acquaintance of mine from a gym I went to), became the soundtrack of a third-year high school life of loneliness and feeling, towards girls, suffering and fascinating, combined with the songs of the recently deceased Fabrizio De André, until early September 2000.

The sequence of the first 7 songs out of 14 is one of the most exciting musical memories of a time when some of the new releases by artists or albums of those already known led me to make the artists my own: that of high school.

If musically from 'Animal Instinct' to 'Desperate Andy' the group doesn't say anything new in terms of sounds, however, that sequence creates an emotion in me that starts with a fairly calm ballad, moving to a well-paced but not so Rock song ('Loud and Clear'), continuing with a more powerful yet domestic Rock ('Promises'), a slightly lighter song to shake off the quite significant 'agitation' of the previous track ('You and Me'), an apparently dramatic song about past youth ('Just my imagination'), a fairly calm but deep song about the infidelities of one's partner (Dolores was already married at the time) ('Shattered') and an optimistic one, at least in music and interpretation, to close in momentary serenity, before continuing from track 8 or from Side B when cassettes still existed.

From 'Saving Grace' to 'Sorry Son' (the one with the 'Psychedelic breeze', the 'psychedelic breeze' in the lyrics: what courage!*), a series of passable but almost negligible songs in my opinion today, excluding the quiet 'What's on my Mind' and the ethereal and, in Dolores' voice, delicate 'Dying in the Sun' (which I sang on a late January morning, at the most significant cemetery in Genoa, in the section of Anglo-American war casualties**, a few days after Dolores' death***).

'Bury the Hatchet' closes the period of great international success for the group and stylistically of the first production that made them great in history.

A real interest from me would not happen again with the next album. And in the future, I remember, thinking about the Cranberries would always and only mean the high school period. Unforgettable...

*for a song dedicated to a child

**the white crosses used in the Anglo-Saxon world

***to whom I became attached