Hello there peeps. So what keeps me up these days? Listening to Irish rock such as the likes of Sinead O’Connor (whom I have given spot light on my previous post) and The Cranberries. U2 would have to be my first introduction to Irish rock and then followed by The Cranberries. It was an accident that a throw away Joshua Tree came to me in a box along with Duran Duran‘s The Big Thing. At first the guitars thew me off (blame it on my Frank Sinatra upbringing) but when I got through the noise I became a witness to sheer aural beauty and Bono‘s deep haunting voice. It seems the term haunting has always been synonymous with Irish vocal qualities. Except when I listen to The Corrs, I don’t really sense a trace of that Irish haunting quality in Andrea Corr‘s vocals.

It was around 1993 or 1994 when I picked up Everybody Else is Doing It So Why Can’t We.Dreams at that time was big on Modern Rock radio and I was attracted to that atmospheric quality of the music and Dolores O’Riordan‘s beautiful voice. I played it to my pals and I got along with people who were into modern rock at that time. It stayed with me for a long time as well as No Need to Argue, the band’s sophomore effort. But succeeding albums didn’t really warm up my taste. I found the band too engrossed with testosterone and that Dolores was missing the point why people came to like her in the first place. It seemed that she wanted to be ‘one of the boys’ which was a total disappointment because it’s the girlie girlie stuff about her that I came to like in the first place. But yeah, I will always list these two albums as my favorites.

Of course there are others such as  Waterboys, The Pogues as well as Luka Bloom and they added to the collage of this ideas why I love Irish music in the first place.