Review:

on 2011-05-12 CharlesMartel Said:

Oh dear!

Poor Waterboys. From having probably one of the best albums of all time ("This Is the Sea") they next went to this. Scott abandoned the Big Music, the sound which had characterised the Waterboys' first three albums, and jacked up the Celtic folk aspect which had always underpinned his music in a subtle and indefinable way. Like Dexy's Midnight Runners before him, who went from the sophistication of "Geno" to the romper-stomping barnyard farce of "Come on Eileen", the result is a shambles. Like so many other bands, just as the band was standing on the edge of greatness, and the fame and fortune that went with it (Lloyd Cole, Fischer-Z to name but two others), the leader took a wrong turn and up the blind alley of self-indulgence.

Before this album came out, the world was expectantly waiting for Mike Scott to unleash his genius on us all once again. The next album after "This Is the Sea" had the capacity to catapult the Waterboys to deserved international stardom. All that was needed was an album of epic music, epic themes and an epic panorama against which to place them  all well within the capacity of Mike Scott to do  and the Waterboys would have become the undisputed best band on the planet. U2 must have been shitting themselves.

But Mike Scott had been to Ireland and had decided he didn't want to be a rock star. Instead he wanted to be a leprechaun. The big sound was abandoned for the squeaky and tinny sound of the fiddle and the banjo. The epic themes and lyrics, replete with a sort of spiritual reaffirmation of the power of the human spirit was replaced with twee little ditties which might as well have been about feeding the chickens as anything else. This album was a Honorius to its predecessor's Theodosius; an Edward II to its predecessors Edward I; a cygnet to a swan.

I know Mike Scott is a genius, and sometimes geniuses can be a little mad, but he really blew it with this one. It was a mistake of epic proportions and one from which he and the band would never recover. The album itself isn't horrendous. I give it a three which is mediocre but OK. One or two of the tracks, such as the title track, show flashes of the brilliance which made its predecessor such a colossal release. But then Scott sinks back into some sort of folksy masquerading. Why he had to produce such crap as "A Bang On the Ear", "When Will We Be Married", "Has Anyone Here Seen Hank" and the truly awful version of "Sweet Thing" is quite beyond me. Imagine if U2 had gone into hiding and when they emerged produced an album of songs for Morris Dancing!

The truth is that this album killed off the Waterboys as a force in music. I turned away from them in disappointment and did not go back and check out anything they did for nearly twenty years thereafter. But despite Mike Scott's attempt to recapture the grandeur of his first three albums with later efferts, he couldn't manage it. And we all have suffered for it. From standing on the edge of greatness with the world potentially beating a path to pay homage to his genius, Scott lost himself in an Irish bog. When this album came out I am pretty sure that U2 breathed a collective sigh of relief. The more is the pity for all of us.
Rating: 6/10