by David Wilikofsky
Sometimes you hear a track from an artist and instantly know they’re going to be huge; it’s the feeling I got when I heard both Savages’ and Black Midi’s early singles. Irish poet Sinead O’Brien has long been another artist that fell into this category for me. Her debut single “A Thing You Call Joy” was released three years ago, and it still feels like a near perfect three minutes of music; O’Brien’s spoken word poetry melts into the track’s post punk backdrop, its tight grooves perfectly locked into the ebbs and flows of her delivery. After a few more singles and an EP, O’Brien has finally released her full length debut. At its best,Time Bend And Brake The Bower captures the magic of her early singles, a near perfect amalgam of words and music.
O’Brien artistry starts with her writing. Her words are poetry, and as such often eschew traditional verse chorus song structures for something more free and formless. Her best tracks use their musical accompaniment as scaffolding to give shape these poems, transforming them into songs. “GIRLKIND”, one of the early tracks on the album, accomplishes this with its ever shifting sonic textures and elastic tempos, allowing us to intuitively understand the climaxes and nadirs of its lyrics. The danceable grooves of “Like Culture” are punctuated by brief moments of silence, each time marking the end of a thought. Even on looser, more shapeless tracks it’s easy to latch onto particularly beautiful turns of phrase. Like much of her previous work, the album’s sonic palette tends towards upbeat post-punk, seemingly tailer made to get a crowd moving; it’s easy to imagine these songs performed live, with O’Brien starring as a mystical punk oracle.
That’s not to say that everything works here. Melding poetry and music is a tricky business, and the album’s most successful tracks dissolve the difference between the two; O’Brien’s words and the backing tracks become one, moving in tandem to build something larger than the sum of its parts. Some of the experiments that break this formula aren’t as successful; the whiplash dynamic and tempo changes of “Multitudes” make the track feel disjointed, while there seems to be little relationship between words and music in skeletal closer “Go Again.” But I’m glad these tracks ended up on the album because they show O’Brien trying new things and pushing her artistry in new directions. Even when this experimentation results in the occasional misstep, her debut provides ample evidence that’s she’s a talented and ambitious artist, one who’s worth watching in the years to come.