Los Angeles Times
September 11, 1994, Sunday, Home Edition

TWO SIDES OF SINEAD IN 'UNIVERSAL MOTHER'

By Chris Willman


   ** 1/2; SINEAD O'CONNOR, "Universal Mother" (Chrysalis)

   When O'Connor released her last album of original material, 1990's "I Do Not
Want What I Haven't Got," her breathy tirades and tear-stained broadsides had
such a harrowing combination of anger and pathos that she almost seemed to be
refiguring the whole confessional genre.

   Since then, she really has reinvented it -- unfortunately, not in music but
in the world-media confessional, where each new statement about child abuse and
Catholicism or revelation of suicide attempts and substance abuse finally
battered even her believers into concluding that some disturbances are best
dealt with in therapy, not art.

   There are other reasons to dread "Universal Mother" more than anticipate it:
the fact that the new album opens with a brief speech excerpt from author
Germaine Greer suggesting that men are at the root of all society's ills, or the
telling inclusion of Kurt Cobain's "All Apologies," a churlish, benignly defiant
non-apology if ever there were one.

   O'Connor is still playing a game of defense, still finding blame almost
everywhere but in her own heart. And yet the album is far more tender and less
accusatorythan anyone might have imagined. The matriarchy-deifying tone in
several songs might be a bit much for non-womyn, but the concern of a mother and
the ache of a neglected child are both essayed with more emotion than
sensationalism.

   At times -- as in "A Perfect Indian," she's so heartbreakingly spot-on and
surprisingly wise in her song craft that she lets you see through the
childishness to the child, no small feat at this point.

   At other times, she's the Sinead so many love to hate, as with "Famine," a
political treatise claiming that the English invented the Irish famine that's
done as, ulp, a brogue-accented rap number. Overall, though, this mostly quiet,
mostly understated album offers reason to believe that O'Connor will emerge from
her turmoils as a mature recording artist, not the self-obsessed agitpropper TV
viewers and magazine readers have known and feared.