Cranberries
Stars: the best of

THE REVIEW

Let's start with the concept that everything has already been said about the Cranberries and Dolores.

We reiterate that as a band they are now defunct, as the frontwoman decided it was appropriate to bray (because it truly is braying) on Zucchero's duet album, instead of making even a minimal effort to keep this project afloat. We add that they too have not escaped the relentless commercial law of the best of. And we begin to talk, indeed, about this CD.

"Stars" is a sound journey of 20 tracks through the history of the Cranberries, starting from "Anybody else..." to "Wake up..." (both somewhat Wertmüller-like titles, I must say, especially the first one). Note, this is not a best of in the strict sense of the term, but a simple collection of singles released from each album, with the addition of two bland unreleased tracks.
If it were a true best of, there would be songs of the caliber of "I will always," "Dreaming my dreams," "War child," "Shattered" (and on the last album, nothing comes to mind worth mentioning, I wonder why....), but none of that. Just a barren list of singles which, taken out of their original context, seem unable to evoke the same emotions as before.
This applies especially to the extracts from "To the Faithful Departed": it was almost a concept album about the ugliness of humanity and particularly about war (something that is always tragically relevant in Ireland), only by listening to it in full could one grasp the effort to give unity to the tracks, here it is dismembered and reduced to a heap of little songs. The same goes for "Anybody else...", an innovative debut at the time, that felt like Ireland, as sweet as its green fields and as bitter as Guinness.

Now "Dreams" is just the soundtrack of the TV series "Flipper" (and I won't add anything else). The funny thing is that they didn't even bother to re-record them, or rearrange them, or renew them in any way. The pieces were simply taken from one place and moved to another, an amount of work that might have taken about half an hour (congratulations!!!!). The unreleased tracks are beyond comment: "Stars" is another bray in the style of "Pure love," "New New York" I've never managed to listen to.
At this point, my CD (obviously burned) was skipping and agonizing until it stopped, and then they say that objects have no soul... the same reason I was deprived of listening to the ONLY new version, that of "Daffodil Lament" (Wordsworthian citation), but it was already beautiful as it was, so why redo it?

Now the question: why have this CD? I'll give you two reasons NOT to have it:
1) if you have always loved the Cranberries, your heart won't bear to see them fall so low;
2) if, on the contrary, you never cared about the Cranberries, listening to it would only risk making you hate them even more, which, in light of their past, perhaps they don't deserve.

But reconsidering this "work," I would remove the "not." Dust of "Stars"....