Some people rest on their laurels whilst others lay the full 140 pounds of their own body weight upon them and press down enthusiastically. Former Cranberries banshee, Dolores O’Riordan sadly conforms to the latter. In fact she nor any of her co-fruits have managed to offer anything genuinely worthwhile since their jangling, spectral debut spat up a handful of worthy hits in the mid-90s. ‘Zombie’ was disappointing, ‘Salvation’ was more disappointing still and ‘Ridiculous Thoughts’ was just plain ridiculous. So where does that leave us now? Well after her first solo album, ‘Are You Listening?’ drew a less than positive response from those who had stuck around Riordan long enough to see her become the 10th richest woman in Ireland, marry, spawn several children and adopt the kind of attitude more commonly associated with those with nothing left to prove and even less inclination to bother, new album, ‘No Baggage’ sees the wealthy County Limerick singer pile on the mascara and mountainous production signatures for a widescreen and predictably stodgy rerun of the socially (and now spiritually) conscious power-pop that characterised all the worst bits of the Cranberries (anything from ‘Dreams’ onwards).Falling squarely into this nasty little enclave are tracks like ‘Skeleton’, ‘Be Careful’ and ‘The Journey’. Blame it on the cruelly unimaginative guitars, the thunderous, lumpy drumming, too much compression or the fact that Riordan’s idea of a chorus is now about as subtle hitting your head repeatedly against a wall, blame it on anything, in fact, but the boogie. What there is though are literally hundreds of unnecessary studio add-ons: crazy African percussion, some token Celtic noises, a mellotron (which can make even the most pedestrian song sound vaguely ‘psychedelic’) and more vocal layering than a Welsh male-voice choir. Only when Riordan ditches the fat and overwrought production values does she come anywhere close to repeating the dreamy melancholia of tracks like ‘Linger’ or sweet, beguiling mischief of ‘Pretty’. The truth is, one-word titles do a similar kind of magic with ‘Stupid’, with a vocal that creeps prettily around the sweetest (and simplest) of piano riffs, and ‘Lunatics’ which adopts similar criteria. And minus the god-awful percussion, ‘Tranquilliser’ must rank as one of Riordan’s purest songs to date.
Sadly, a one trick pony has more up its sleeve than Riordan when she’s in ‘mainstream’ mode and that’s she’s entered this mode is clear from the amusingly self-conscious album artwork which shows the singer is a variety of poses, vaguely reminiscent of Lulu’s work with Freemans catalogue and Marty Hopkirk (deceased). But if we can surmise one thing from these photos, it’s that Riordan is demanding that we reconcile her preening opulence with her rustic and spiritual roots. Afterall, what other explanation could there be for including a picture of Dolores perched in a tree wearing white Versace casuals?
That Riordan has a voice whose reach and rate of expansion is greater even than that of ivy curling around a fairytale tower is as true now and it was back in those shrill, halcyon days of ‘Dreams’, but until she prunes her sound and cuts all those dead and crowded braches back to their stems, she seems unlikely to grow. The original material may have been slightly gauche and the execution slightly clumsy, but that is what made it so worthwhile: the diamond shines brightest when the rocks around them look slightly soiled.
Perhaps next time she’ll travel lighter. And burn even brighter because of it.