The Cranberries – at The Strand – Review

The Cranberries

at The Strand
by Kerry Joyce
photo by Jen Beatty

I tried to get into the Cranberries show at the Orpheum, but I wound up at the show at the Strand in Providence the following night instead. Lucky me. It was the last show of their American tour, and the Strand provides a more relaxing and informal atmosphere than the Orpheum anyway. You have to stand, but at least you’re not chained to a seat. Arrive early and get close to the stage or arrive late and elbow your way to the front, if you don’t mind risking a sharper elbow back at you by one of the few Bostonians scattered about the room. You can order a beverage during the show and even invoke the nicotine goddess to accompany your listening experience. Few do.

Who’d have thunk you could get this close to an official MTV icon with no more inconvenience than having a big guy at the door put a strip of plastic around your wrist. But that’s about what you’d expect from the Cranberries, whose off-stage public personna is one of incomprehensible humility. Some people find it endearing, I suppose, that lead singer Dolores O’Riordon refuses to let a little thing like being an extraordinary musical talent and an incredible lyricist keep her from acting as though those details of her life don’t change a thing. Although she shuns the star-maker machine off stage, O’Riordan opened with cocky self-assurance, an attitude she maintained througout.

The band played all their hits and most of the songs from their first two albums. The second CD no need to argue demonstrated remarkable progress from their widely acclaimed first effort, an exciting and promising phenomenon from a band whose members are still in their early twenties.

The real draw is O’Riordon’s vocals, which range from the low growls of “Zombie” to the highest of high notes in most everything else. At times, she seems to sing those poetically moving lyrics of hers, in a key personally commissioned from on high, using the mastery of a very un-pop vocal range and style within the usual pop format, as well as some distinctly Irish trimmings, for a haunting and powerful effect. The most obvious comparison between O’Riordan and her contemporaries is with another Irish singer, Sinead O’Connor. Like O’Connor, O’Riordan strongly suspects that fame and fortune are not the solution for life’s universally thornier problems. But where O’Connor whines and wallows, O’Riordon, when she sings: “I wanted to be the mother of your child but now it’s just farewell,” expresses only her grief, not her ultimate defeat.

Looking as lovely as Phaedrus, O’Riordon played the guitar, occasionally the keyboard, as she sang, often thrusting the microphone into the crowd, inviting us to join in. It was as if she fully expected us to be well-versed in even her lesser known songs. We were.

O’Riordon also danced quite vigorously, while slowly and deliberately discarding an article or two of clothing. Though not exactly Herod’s stepdaughter, she did seem ready to summon the sound man’s head on a platter when feedback intruded on the performance one too many times. Braless, in a tight sleeveless t-shirt, O’Riordon finished off with an Irish step dance, and at last resolved the ancient mystery of why the Gaels of old insisted that the women keep their arms rigid at their sides when bounding rhythmically about the pagan bonfire.

Who knows what the future holds for Dolores O’Riordan and the Cranberries. A break up followed by a gig doing show-tunes in Vegas? Double bills with Steve Miller at Great Woods? A trust fund/farmhouse retirement in rural Limerick? Or lasting success?

The answer depends on the poetic power of O’Riordan’s pen, and a greater emergence of the other young band members as artistic forces in their own right.