Cranberries get smashed
on 'Wake Up'
By Cara Sarelli
Daily Cougar Staff
To celebrate its 10-year union, Irish pop-rock
band The Cranberries released its newest work, Wake up and Smell the Coffee.
But it
might not be worth celebrating.
The band's first two albums, Everybody
Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1992) and No Need to Argue (1994) --
the band's most
successful to date -- were produced by
Stephen Street. Tasting that success may have been what brought The Cranberries
home again.
Street produced Wake Up in Dublin.
Though the songs are somewhat catchy and
singer Delores O'Riordan's voice remains as crisp, clear and piercing as
ever, this album
doesn't have much else to offer those
who aren't die-hard Cranberries fans -- who, these days, are hard to come
by.
Sloppily written, vague lyrics carry the
album over what could have been a musically talented work. At first earshot,
Wake Up sounds all
right, but upon repeated listenings, with
the exception of four of the 13 tracks, it becomes no more than tolerable.
"Analyze," the single that has topped charts
all over Europe, including in Spain where it is No. 3, deserves some credit.
It's
happy-sounding as it emphasizes the album's
carpe diem attitude. The chorus is this: "Don't analyze, don't analyze/
Don't go that way,
don't live that way/ That would paralyze
your evolution."
Maybe the band's trying to tell its fans
not to analyze its music -- for fear of losing them.
Or maybe it's unfair to the new album to
judge it in comparison to earlier Cranberries work. After all, it's hard
to top such previous hits as
"Linger" and "Zombie."
The intimate sounds of "Chocolate Brown"
and the angry tone of "Do You Know" are the album's ending points. The
album as a whole is
not terrible or bad; it just does not
live up to the expectations The Cranberries have built for itself. If this
were the debut album of a
no-name band, some might say it is "OK."
But for the Cranberries, this is probably
one people will want to skip.
