Christmas All Stars
I suppose my first misgiving about any Christmas theme album is: what would you do with it after Christmas? So when The Chieftains, as redoubtable a six-pack as they come, brought out The Bells of Dublin, I must confess to an ingrained suspicion of any festive release.
Several listens later, I’m glad to have pocketed many of those same suspicions. Paddy Maloney and the crew have assembled a wealth of talent for a spiritual missive of 23 tracks, running for just over an hour.
It’s an unusual line-up, not just for its quality, but for the variety. The vastly underrated Rickie Lee Jones joins them for “O Holy Night,” a beautiful hymn in which traditional airs are enhanced by Suzie Katayama on cello. Nanci Griffith, another excellent vocalist, performs “The Wexford Carol.” It’s no surprise really that The Chieftains show a preference for female vocalists and certainly their melodies are favored by the grace and range of their guests on this album.
Marianne Faithfull, another resurgent talent, also joins them. While there must have been a temptation to do their version of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” with her, they do that with the Renaissance Singers of Belfast instead and Marianne does a fine, brief version of “I Saw Three Ships A Sailing.” Kate and Anna McGarrigle also appear for the Breton “II Est Né/Ca Berger,” and combinations elsewhere on the album underline the group’s ready ease across Celtic styles.
Jackson Browne, never one to set a Christmas tree alight, also appears for ‘The Rebel Jesus,’ a serious, thoughtful and uninteresting number that sounds uncannily like every other Jackson Browne song; Elvis Costello performs a mediocre “St. Stephen’s Day Murders,” which he co-wrote with Paddy Maloney; old friend, Burgess Meredith narrates over “Don Oíche Ud I mBeithil” and the famous Christchurch Cathedral bells of Dublin, which give the album its name, provide the bookend sound.
For the medleys, the album stays in the festive vein although you could listen to these any time.
A six-part medley for “The Wren! The Wren!” leads off with Brendan Begley’s accordion and goes into “The Dingle Set” before Chieftain singer, Kevin Conneff, joins The Voice Squad from Dublin in fine fettle. Still within the medley, it’s two straight reels, followed by Kathryn Tickell on Northumbrian pipes segueing into Conneff and the Squad to round it off with a lamely standard “This is the Season to be Merry.” Curiously, while “The Wren! The Wren!” conveys the joys of the season, it draws on a Celtic custom which offers little reason to be cheerful, particularly if you’re a wren.
Whatever its origins, the practice of wren-hunting became a custom on St. Stephen’s Day. As Paddy Maloney relates, men and boys of the parish would search the bushes and hedges for wrens, the smallest known bird then – bar the hummingbird – to chase and kill.
In some areas, other boys would play music, seeking money in exchange for the burial of the wren.
While this exercise might have been great fun, and even lucrative, to participants, it suggests the same happy barbarism of a fox hunt. “The Wren in the Furzei part of the medley conjures up a horrific picture, and not the magical harmonies conveyed by Kevin Coneff and the guest trio.
But forgive my sensitivities.
Spanning 28 years and 24 albums, The Chieftains have produced such a rich body of music that they can put their own flavor on every variety of material. Paddy Maloney, who produced this album and arranges the traditional melodies- including the beautiful “Skyline Jig”- leads the band but Derek Bell’s harp lends a distinctive, dreamy Celtic sound to flautist Matt Molloy, Kevin Conneff’s crisp percussion and the best of fiddling from Martin Fay and Seán Keane.
U2’s Achtung Baby
For the four Dubliners who make up U2, the late 1980’s were the best of times.
After flirting with and eventually finding mainstream success with their first few albums, The Unforgettable Fire and especially The Joshua Tree made them perhaps the biggest rock band in the world.
They had a Midas touch of sorts- everything they touched went platinum. Even the Rattle and Hum LP, which was little more than a muddled afterthought to The Joshua Tree, became a bestseller.
Yet, the late 80’s also had its downside.
Young contenders to the throne started kicking over U2’s statues. Largely due to a perceived air of pomp and conceit by the band, in particular its leader, Bono, the aura of respect and infallibility afforded to Irish rock’s other elder statesmen, Christy Moore and Van Morrison, proved elusive. U2 parodies abounded. Younger bands such as Dublin’s Power of Dreams gleefully attacked their elders, charging them with being bloated dinosaurs, hopelessly out of touch.
At the least, Achtung Baby is an attempt to reverse all that. Recorded mostly in Berlin, the album shuns the American cowboy rock and blues that have defined U2 in the past five years in favor of a sleek, continental dance sound. Whereas in the recent past the band has embraced Americana, they now are found gyrating in sweaty continental dance halls.
Musically, songs like “Ultraviolet” and “Mysterious Ways” have less in common with old comrade B.B. King than they do with the new dance rock sounds of England’s Happy Mondays and Jesus Jones.
Guitarist The Edge has changed the sound of the band considerably, foregoing the standard guitar harmonics in favor of more power riffs and plenty of organs and keyboards. The adjustments make for a fresh new sound and ushers U2 into the dance world, a place which has certainly been alien to them until now.
Some of the songs could do with a bit more of the new style U2, such as “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” and “So Cruel,” which show a complete lack of imagination musically.
Especially on “Who’s Gonna Ride,” which has a dull chorus repeated over a driving guitar riff, growing gradually harder and louder, U2 is caught relying too much on old tricks.
Bono seems to have totally embraced the apocalyptic madness that is Berlin, the confused energy which makes that city crackle. There are no political or social overtones as there were in past songs such as “Red Hill Mining Town,” “Mothers of the Disappcared” or “Wire,” just an amoral and atheistic longing.
“Zoo Station,” presumably inspired by the central railway stop in Berlin of the same name, sizzles with menacing guitar riffs and Bono’s mechanically distorted voice. On “Acrobat” Bone sings, “And I’d join the movement/ If there was one I could believe in/ Yeah I’d break bread and wine/ If there was a church I could receive in/’Cos I need it now….”
Which is not to say that Bono has abandoned the spiritual side to his songwriting.
He has just contorted his spirituality, confusing the otherworldly with the sensuous, the mystic with the sexual.
This however is also the disappointing thing about his songwriting. Bono seems stuck on this theme of human longing, and one gets the feeling that lyrically he has not matured since the themes of Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” or “Streets with No Name.” On “So Cruel” he sings, “Her skin is pale like God’s only dove/ Screams like an angel for your love/ Then she makes you watch her from above/ And you need her like a drug.” All of this imagery has been dealt with by the band before in far more creative circumstances.
The sound, though, is the compelling thing about Achtung Baby. Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums combine to form a rhythm section slinkier and more danceable than what U2 fans are used to. “Mysterious Ways,” “The Fly,” and “Ultraviolet” are examples of great 90’s guitar-based dance rock. It’s disco music for people who’ve been raised on rock ‘n roll. This may cause them to lose some of their more uncompromising album-oriented rock fans, but singles like “The Fly” and “Mysterious Ways” will undoubtedly win new ones on the dance floor.
Either way, U2 need not worry ー no matter what the critics say, Achtung Baby will be on the charts for a long time.
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