The Cranberries – Bury the Hatchet (1999)

This album is quite topical right now, because the lead singer of The Cranberries, Dolores O'Riordan just died two months ago. Bury the Hatchet, the fourth album of the band, was released after the band's first hiatus when O'Riordan had retreated from the public to take care of her stress related diseases and to have her first child. You can hear the topics related to stress in the lyrics in this album. Compared to the first three albums, the sounds are more polished and as a result, the album doesn't sound as distinctly 90's as the earlier albums. Of course, this was released only just before the turn of the millennium. I really like the very melodic songs on the album that have enough interesting hooks to keep you interested for a long time. O'Riordan's vocals are very original and you can really recognise them anywhere. The world lost an amazing singer when she died.



I remember really well when this album had come out. I was at the department store Stockmann in Tapiola in Finland, close to my childhood home and I saw that The Cranberries had released a new album. I had really been fond of their song Zombie and some other songs on their album No Need to Argue that my sister owned. I didn't really know anything about the new songs so I decided to listen to the album there at the department store. I was really impressed by the sound of the album and I bought it straight away based on that quick introduction. I wasn't disappointed and I remember listening to the album a lot at the time.

Then the the year 2000 came and I was introduced to lots of new indie rock and folk bands that became so dear to me that I still consider many of those bands my all time favourites. That made me forget most of the music I had listened to so far for a long time. Also, much of the 90's music wasn't as cool anymore. Maybe about two years ago, I happened to hear a couple of Cranberries songs somewhere and I was struck again with that same feeling I got from this album way back in the day and I remembered that they are a really great band. As a result, I loaded this album to my iPad and bought a couple of more CDs by them that were really cheap at that time. I'm glad I did this back then, because now with O'Riordan's death, The Cranberries album prices went up again.

It's difficult to write a good description of the individual songs on this album, because they're all just really good, but sound quite similar. I'm just going to name my favourite songs on the album: Animal Instinct, Promises, Just My Imagination and Shattered. I really like the songs that have some quieter acoustic sequences and some rock. If I had to pick just one song, my favourite is probably Shattered, which is just incredibly beautiful song. The chorus gives me goosebumps.

I think my first introduction to The Cranberries was on MTV when I saw the music video for Zombie. In my head, The Cranberries are one of those 90's bands that were constantly playing on MTV and therefore they had some great music videos with proper storylines. This album was maybe later than the golden age of MTV when I saw bunch of their videos, so the songs from this album are not as familiar to me in video-form. I do, however, remember the video for Animal Instinct. In a true 90's fashion, there's a storyline that takes turns with some sequences of the band playing the song. This video seems to combine the topics that were in O'Riordan's mind at the time. There's a very stressed out mother who kidnaps her own children from child aid and while they're running away, she tries to give them a good life despite her obvious personal and financial problems. I can see why a woman, who was just getting her first child and suffering from severe stress would've been concerned about these kinds of topics.

The Cranberries was definitely an important band for my childhood, but it also got another chance decades later when I discovered them again and realised again how good band it actually was.

Listen to the album on Spotify.