The Waterboys
Dream Harder

THE REVIEW

Three years after "Room To Roam" and five years after "Fisherman's Blues", will Mike Scott finally be over his Irish binge, all Guinness and 'skiddly-addlee-dee-do'? In "Dream Harder" it would seem so. Just reading that this album was recorded in New York, and no longer in tiny Spiddal, a village of plaice fishermen in Galway Bay, Ireland, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, is enough to suspect—or hope so. We imagine that the air of the metropolis would benefit Mike Scott as much as the smell of coffee would benefit someone who spent a nightmare night after having too much Tullamore Dew...

Scott, it is reiterated, the mind-soul-heart-guitar-voice-leader of the Waterboys, a project rather than a band, is someone who naturally "interiorizes geography," one would say... If he moves from one nation to another, he lets himself be seduced by easy and uneasy suggestions of various kinds, by different sounds and beliefs, philosophies, cultures, faces, humanity, smiles, environments, styles, architectures, arts, crafts, climates, landscapes... And his music, his literary vein, and his inspiration change from record to record, with the exception of the Irish period, even though the water boys are labeled as 'simple' folk-rock musicians.

The album begins with "The New Life", a programmatic manifesto, and an old-school rock piece... His voice is no longer epic and no longer delivers properly: years of Irish traditionals combined with the study-contemplation of the works of the great Van Morrison have manipulated and forever changed his tortured vocal style, calming it. In partial compensation, his rock songwriting ability remains unchanged. Roaring guitars and drums for the most famous and representative song in their history, in every sense... As for the music, there is a guitar torment in the chorus, refined pop and electric piano trademark in the verses; ascetic female vocalizations providing support between passages... For the lyrics, the perpetual journey of a modern-day Knulp, a traveler who slowly transforms into a pilgrim, who travels the world in search of himself and ends up finding God, "where He always was." This is "Glastonbury Song", a mythical song that, like everything that is simply great in itself, will be violated by an Italian buffoon and turned into a piece of boundless junk... Forget female vocalizations: in the finale, even "po-po-poro" embellishments that wouldn't even be heard in stadiums... For the record, the Italian buffoon is called Samuele Bersani, and for him, songs are all "Chicco E Spillo"...

Atmospheric guitar pop, tinged with gospel, for "Preparing To Fly"... The taste and tension are those of old times, the pre-Ireland ones, and the newfound Anglo-Saxon easy listening is convincing. Scott plays the guitar so well that it makes you curse his versatility: by now, you would have a handful of uncompromised rock records, perhaps less original, but would you compare ten Irish violins - and seven quintals of breaded plaice - with the right sound of a well-played electric guitar?

This album has another great single, also all "spirit," linking the anxiety of a restless man to Middle Eastern-Mediterranean sounds, evoking Homeric journeys to the edges of the world and time, and mystical visions and mirages. "The Return Of Pan", the return of the Greek god and Scott's personal fetish—already present in "This Is The Sea" in the famous "The Pan Within"—comes back to life, or rather never died, despite Jesus. "The great god Pan is alive!" Mike shouts, and then launches into a solo. A track to be danced like Costner, with the wolves. Or with the salamanders...

So far, it is a magnificent spiritual rock album, but we must "settle" for a continuation made of quality pop and less significant episodes, like the little country of "Corn Circles" (the circular signs in cornfields), or the small gems like the minute-long "Winter Winter" and "Wanders Of Lewis". The New York air resurfaces in the pop-reggae of "Suffer", nothing representative, while the "aquatic" notes return (even the guitar is flat and "underwater") in the evocative ballad "Love And Death".

A psychedelic spoken word, for Scott, who prophesizes the return, along with the god Pan, of another who, if not divine, had little in common with humanity, in "The Return Of Jimi Hendrix". Beautiful is the mix of Irish-folk compositional taste and Indian sounds, sitar, and various bells... What is a cod fisherman doing in Kathmandu? The quality pop, from a metropolitan bar, at the end of which a sax will return to phrase as in the old days, will close the album with "Good News"; his pop-rock-blues, that of "The Big Music" and "A Pagan Place" has undoubtedly always been in his strings, and it goes well with "the thousand lights of New York," but that's not what an album with those first four tracks should have been nourished by...

"Dream Harder", whose compositional quality is impeccable, is a disjointed album, where the stronger pieces poorly match with experiments of 'rearranged residual folk' (the albeit good "Spiritual City" and "Corn Circles") and to the New York pop of "Suffer" and "Good News". As a result, the album would have been much better if all pop, and excellent if all "pagan rock" and "polytheistic rock" (there doesn't have to be only 'Christian'!). But after a binge of quadruple malt beer like the one Mike had in Spiddal, a village of plaice fishermen on the Atlantic's edge, in Galway Bay, every sound is fine. As long as it's different from the usual.