With Faith and Courage, Sinéad O'Connor comes close to the sublime fury that made her first album such a landmark. Aside from a few derailments, she stays on the track of her passion throughout this project. The big-band indulgences are behind her, and she has found a way to add the right touches of softness to the defiance that defined her earliest work.
She does this best in the context of her own songs. O'Connor writes directly, with a blunt eloquence. Her chords and melodies are basic. The magic lies in the textures that support this structure, most of which reflect the input of producer and former Eurythmics wizard Dave Stewart, and of course in her words and ringing delivery. Like most ideologues, though, she lacks humor; nowhere on Faith and Courage is it possible to imagine her smiling.
The thrills come when O'Connor transcends these self-imposed limits and exposes the tender eye within the hurricanes of her music. "Daddy I'm Fine" paints a picture of a daughter's declaration that her father's dreams for her have become irrelevant. In fact, she bludgeons him with barbed blows, insisting that she wants to take the stage with a rock 'n' roll band and "stand up tall with my boobs up right," looking "like I want to fuck every man in sight." As the band whips into a double-time punk thrash, her voice tightens to a raging snarl -- and when the very last chord hits like a car collision, she softens all at once and offers the last line: "Daddy, I love you."
These emotional complexities are part of real life, and it's O'Connor's gift to bring them to her music. "No Man's Woman" leads from broadside propaganda to a confession of the singer's need for a man who "don't take away all the love he has." She affirms that she never wants to become a "man's woman," declares that she'll never trust men again -- yet confides that despite all she is in a relationship that she "doesn't tell" everyone about. Exterior bravado masks the wounds that linger within and illuminates the conflicts that define our experience.
Like "No Man's Woman," many of the songs on Faith and Courage follow a steady crescendo, with instrumentation and drum tracks expanded as the tune unfolds. Her vocal showpiece, "My Dying Day," opens with thickening synth pads, which begin to stir as drums slam into action; buffeted by deep electronic textures, O'Connor's voice is strong yet somehow fragile here, like a beacon on a threatening night. And on the medium-tempo "Til I Whisper You Something," she coaxes the music into a long, sustained peak through vocal variations that recall Peter Gabriel's vamp at the end of "Sledgehammer."
The weaker tracks are those which pull O'Connor away from her no-nonsense approach. "The State I'm In," written by Scott Cutler, is far too abstract for her sensibility. Certainly she can sing the tune, but its truncated verses, odd chord sequences, unexpected cadences, and intrusively inverted chords don't give her much expressive room. Her own composition, "The Lamb's Book of Life," is nearly as unsuccessful -- an eighth-note march feel on the bass drum doesn't fit the modified ska groove, the trumpet figure comes across as a little pretentious, and the machine-gun samples are downright silly. Bizarre samples also mar "If U Ever," in which an otherwise effective metaphor of driving to escape one's pain is undercut by a tire-skid sound that might work better in a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
These unsatisfactory moments, however, indicate O'Connor's apparent interest in not being pigeonholed. That she succeeds on familiar territory is no shame. And that Faith and Courage works as well as it does pays tribute to her returning and resurgent artistry.
