“Take Me to Church”, the first single on Sinéad O’Connor’s 11th album, I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss, is one of her sloganeering songs, for lack of a better word. It opens with a heady rush of words, half-rapped and half-sung, that race into the triumphal chorus. The song has no time for the niceties of verses or bridges as O’Connor elaborates on the idea of church: “Take me to church but not the ones that hurt/ ‘Cause that ain’t the truth.” On paper, such repetition might seem lazy or at least unimaginative, but there’s power in the device. O’Connor sounds increasingly defiant and demanding as the song progresses, injecting the song with a hearty dose of ambiguity. “Church” could be any church or, if capped, the Catholic Church, with which she has had a strained relationship for most of her life. More generally, it could be some refuge or safe haven; the bedroom or, more specifically, a mind-obliterating orgasm. It could be a musical groove, a moment of in-the-pocket synchronicity that sounds spiritual. By emptying the song of specifics, O’Connor manages to make it all the more meaningful.
“Take Me to Church” is also a song about new beginnings. The sense of disconnecting oneself from the past puts I’m Not Bossy on par with its predecessor, 2012’s How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, on which she testified to the ignominy of romance with gravity, dignity, and what sounded like a new and sharper sense of self-possession. On the other hand, it also sounded musically regressive, setting her vocals against fairly innocuous guitar strums and drum loops*. I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss*, is much more musically adventurous, not to mention more lyrically ambitious; it’s also a bit more self-conscious, which means it never packs the same punch as its predecessor.
There has always been a knee-jerk assumption (even by this reviewer) that the “I” in O’Connor’s songs is O’Connor herself—that her one lyrical mode is bluntly confessional. Bossy, however, sounds like an extended attempt to get outside herself and tell someone else’s story. The album cover signals as much: this is O’Connor playing dress-up, shedding her own skin and slipping inside someone else’s, and the album plays like a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a young woman just realizing her own sexual desires. On “Dense Water Deeper Down”, she’s justifying her attraction to the kind of men her mother warned her about. “Your Green Jacket” and “The Vishnu Room” (the latter being the album's original title, before it was swapped with the Ban Bossy-referencing title it has now) negotiate the terms of commitment and desire, but “The Voice of My Doctor” violently shatters her illusions and introduces harsh consequences to loving so intently. As the album progresses, the woman develops a stronger sense of her own identity and self-worth.
At times, this overarching concept taxes O’Connor’s songwriting abilities. She has a plainspoken, conversational style that tends toward artlessness: “I love you more than I ever loved a man, and I’m shy,” she sings on “The Vishnu Room”. “I want to make love with you more than I ever wanted to.” On the other hand, as a singer she inhabits the character unreservedly, letting those blunt phrases convey the excitement and naïve intensity of new desires. Her technique of layering her voice into a small choir of Sinéads occasionally takes the urgency and edge out of her voice, but during the second half of Bossy, where those emotions grow suddenly more complex, she shows the full expressive range of her voice and sounds more commanding than she has in years. She spits venom on “The Voice of My Doctor”, conveys shaky determination on “8 Good Reasons”, then bends her notes bitterly on “Harbour”, ratcheting up the angst until the song explodes into a loud, caustic outro that recalls the thunder of her 1987 debut, The Lion and the Cobra.
Musically, O’Connor paints with a much broader palette than she did on How About I Be Me. The acoustic guitars and drum loops are still there, but on “Kisses Like Mine” a full backing band bolsters her sexual bravado with snaky Nuggets rock. “The Voice of My Doctor” is even heavier—a sludgy number whose barbed guitar licks echo the narrator’s fierce outrage. That narrative range of sound makes the prayer-like hush of closer “Streetcars”, with its reverbed keyboard and whispered vocals, sound all the more poignant. O’Connor is pushing herself on every song here—maybe not always in the right or most obvious or safest directions, but always with some purpose. A quarter-century into a career that has swung unpredictably from acoustic dissent to big-band jazz to reggae and dub experimentation, she continues to lay claim to every musical possibility and refuses to define herself with only one particular style.
