(MusicPortal.com) (09/16/05)

Edited By Michael Bennett

NEW YORK, NY, USA - A new album from vocalist SINEAD O'CONNOR, "Throw Down Your Arms," is scheduled to be released on October 4th.

Thirteen years after she stepped back from the brink of superstardom, O'Connor has finally made the disc toward which she has been building her whole career.

In April of this year, she traveled alone to Kingston, Jamaica to record "Throw Down Your Arms" at world famous Tuff Gong and Anchor Studios.

A collection of roots songs which have inspired Sinead O'Connor in her life and work for the past fifteen years, the legendary Reggae rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare produced the album, and many of the musicians who played on the original album were enlisted to give added authenticity to the sound.

The title comes from one of the tracks on the disc, originally written and performed by Studio One legend Winston Rodney, a.k.a. "Burning Spear," who also contributes four other cuts: 'Jah Nuh Dead,' 'Marcus Garvey,' 'Door Peep' and 'He Prayed.'

Burning Spear's recurrent themes - the living God on earth, the role of pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, and personal and social redemption - were a huge influence on O'Connor, and echoes of his earthy delivery can be heard in her own vocal style on "Throw Down Your Arms."

However, the tracks are tributes - not imitations.

Just as the Irish songs on "Sean Nos Nua" were subtly "Jamaicanized," so Sinead O'Connor has added in her own Irish style to certain tracks on the album. While staying true to the composer's vision, O'Connor has also stamped each of the tracks with that distinctively soulful roar that has electrified her fans all over the world for nearly two decades.

As Robbie Shakespeare observed to nobody in particular after hearing O'Connor lay down a particularly goose bump-inducing vocal: "forget the originals baby, these ARE the originals."

O'Connor will put out "Throw Down Your Arms" this October on her own label. That's why there's Chocolate and Vanilla (a favorite expression of her deceased manager Steve Fargnoli). As she pulls together the threads from over a decade of work, Sinead O'Connor will -- for the first time in eight years -- tour North America this Fall.

"The shows are the whole point," she says. "I can't wait to be onstage with Sly and Robbie. I want to pass on the teachings of the Rastafarai movement, sing the songs and have fun. It will be better than mass."

Since she first came to prominence as a teenager in the late 80s, the world had never seen or heard anything like quite like Sinead O'Connor.

In the midst of so many big-haired Pop ingenues that made their name in that decade, she stood out: a shaven-headed waif with bambi eyes, bovver boots and a soaring, acrobatic voice.

Her daringly eclectic debut album, "The Lion And The Cobra" (1987), blended influences from Hip-Hop, Punk and traditional Irish music, and won her widespread critical acclaim and an international following.

It should have been the most joyous small-town-girl-makes-good success story.

Before many of her peers had left school, Sinead O'Connor had gone from busking the streets of Dublin, Ireleand to playing the Grammys - something no Irish woman had ever heretofore done.

But, far from home and coping with the recent death of her mother, the young singer balked at the sudden success. For her, music was not a ticket to "the big time," but a springboard out of small-town boredom, a means of expressing her spirituality and a salve for the mental wounds, which were the legacy of a difficult childhood.

When her then-manager, Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, broke the news to her that her second single, 'Mandinka,' had debuted inside the English top twenty, the singer broke into tears.

She knew the game was up. Music would from that point be forever linked with business. And by January of 1990, business had begun to boom like never before.

O'Connor cover of Prince's cast-off tale of love lost was released and shot straight to number one in every country with a chart. The stark, iconoclastic video for Nothing Compares 2 U featured nothing more complicated than a continuous close-up of Sinead's face, one moment twisted in anger the next, famously, crying a solitary tear.

It became one of the most celebrated music videos of all time and won Sinead and director John Maybury a slew of awards. The groundbreaking album, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" (1990) featured songs so intensely personal that the record company had initially hesitated to release it. It went on to become one of the most successful records of the decade, and influenced a whole generation of artists.

But the mantle of fame continued to sit uneasily on Sinead O'Connor's slender shoulders.

She found the spotlight of public attention oppressive, and feared that the continual pressure to tour and promote herself as a commodity would stymie her creative progress.

And so, with -- as Buju Banton had it, "no regard for who she may tickle" - O'Connor set about sabotaging her success. Her third album "Am I Not Your Girl?" (1992), was a deliberate commercial sidestep and in the sleeve notes the singer hinted that her music would soon have a more overtly spiritual feel.

On October 3rd, 1992 Sinead O'Connor appeared on "Saturday Night Live" with a Rastafarian prayer cloth wrapped around the microphone and sang an impassioned acapella version of 'War' by Bob Marley, in which she altered the lyrics to make reference to child abuse.

After crying "fight the real enemy," she then tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II. This controversial gesture was her protest against the Catholic patriarchy's contribution to the oppressive culture of silence that in turn lead to the child abuse scandals which were to rock America and her native Ireland.

Predictably, this principled stand caused her to be pilloried in the press, but O'Connor had nonetheless taken a giant leap towards achieving her aim. She had publicly abdicated her status as mainstream Pop star, and allied herself with a more spiritual musical tradition.

That tradition was Rastafarian culture and roots music, which she had fallen in love with during her first three years in London. Having experienced the worst effects of Catholic repression in her home country, O'Connor wanted to "rescue God from religion" in her own life.

Rastafarianism, with it's emphasis on the struggle for self-esteem and its teaching that God is a living presence on earth appealed strongly to her as an Irish Catholic female survivor of child abuse.

The educational prayerfulness, the controlled anger and the funky bombast of much Jamaican music were something Sinead O'Connor was already striving for in her own work.

Roots music (as distinct from the more commercial Reggae which came out of Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s) was deeply religious, but with without the po-faced saccharine overtones of many contemporary hymns.

And so, over the next decade O'Connor would begin to weave Roots influences into her work. Like the great Caribbean singers, she would sing in her own accent and dialect and incorporate more explicit spiritual overtones into her lyrics.

Her next album, "Universal Mother" (1994), featured 'Fire On Babylon,' a song that -- like the "Saturday Night Live" version of 'War' - had as its themes child abuse and the Rastafarian version of an earthly Hell.

In her live shows during the mid nineties Sinead O'Connor began to sing a gorgeously pared-down version of Marley's 'Redemption Song' and together with Bomb The Base and Benjamin Zephaniah wrote and recorded 'Empire,' a track heavily influenced by the Studio One greats of the 1960s, which would feature on her "Greatest Hits" album, "So Far, The Best Of Sinead O'Connor" (1997).

On her next full studio album, "Faith And Courage" (2000), O'Connor married the slack Reggae beat, which now characterized much of her production, to prayerful self-penned songs and one Christian hymn, 'Kyrie Eleison.'

Due to family commitments, O'Connor did not tour in support of that album but did make an appearance on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," which was also the last time that she has performed live in America.

By the time "Faith And Courage" was released, Sinead O'Connor had moved back to her native Ireland where huge changes were taking place. Rocked by child abuse scandals, the Catholic churches numbers were dwindling and there had been a huge influx of African refugees into the country.

Many criticized what they saw as economic immigrants, but O'Connor viewed the new arrivals as an answer to the spiritual vacuum left by the Catholic Church's receding influence.

On her next album, "Sean Nos Nua" (2002), she symbolized this converging of the old and new Irelands by taking traditional Gaelic songs and updating them with Reggae dubs. She toured in support of the disc in 2002/2003, playing to sold-out venues all over Ireland, Britain and continental Europe.

Last year, O'Connor released "She Who Dwells In The Secret Place Of The Most High Shall Abide Under The Shadow Of The Almighty" (2004), an album of unreleased tracks and collaborations, before stepping even further back from mainstream music by declaring she would only record "spiritual" records.

However, Sinead O'Connor maintains that distinctively soulful roar on "Throw Down Your Arms."

Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than on a track written by one of Sly and Robbie's former collaborators, Peter Tosh.

On 'Downpressor Man,' O'Connor's voice is a high plaintive wail at one moment, the next a venomous snarl - Shakespeare's virtuoso guitar playing adds to the rich sonic brew.

On 'Curly Locks,' the Lee Perry track, her chameleon-like delivery changes character again, this time becoming a sensual whisper. "Which one will be your choice," she breathes, already knowing the answer.

Two of the songs on "Throw Down Your Arms" also mark pivotal moments in Sinead O'Connor's life.

'Vampire,' first recorded by Devon Irons, has a special resonance for O'Connor. It was this track that she danced to after her ordination in Lourdes, France in 1999.

With its menacing, mantra-like chant it is in fact a type of Rastafarian spell, which aims to cast out evil. 'War,' similarly, has changed the course of her life and career, and in this context needs no introduction.

'Jah Prophet Has Arise,' from her favorite band, Israel Vibration, is maybe the funkiest cut on the album.

Up to now in her career, O'Connor has always recorded her own backing vocals. Here, her sepulchral chanting is backed by three Jamaican women as they sing in unison of biblical retribution.

Throughout her career, Sinead O'Connor has always connected unbelievably with the sad numbers and on Buju Banton's 'Untold Stories,' a heartbreaking tale of poverty and social hypocrisy, she delivers a searingly emotive performance.

The centerpiece of the whole album and her favorite track is 'Y Mas Gan,' a track first released by Roots trio The Abyssinians.

With its dread slow rhythm it is essentially it is a Rastafarian hymn, written partly in Amharic, which pledges devotion to God.

One of the lyrics, "if we can't be good, we'll be careful," was an alternative title for the album, and sums up O'Connor's courageous, almost pugnacious, approach to her life and faith.

Sinead O'Connor is already writing her own collection of spiritual songs to be entitled "Theology," for release some time in 2007.

Some albums, as Van Morrison once said, demand to be made. For O'Connor, "Throw Down Your Arms" is that very album. It is the human voice used as an instrument of spiritual healing.

Irish philosopher Mark Patrick Hederman wrote: "Singing is a way of proclaiming a better world, a refusal to give in to the grimness of the past."

It is Sinead O'Connor's hope that people find comfort and inspiration in the songs on "Throw Down Your Arms" as she does, and that in making the album, she indeed has gone some small way toward -- as she once put it -- "rescuing God from religion."

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