There are several ways to describe Dolores ’Riordan’s voice. In some songs, The Cranberries’ singer sounds as sweetly aching as Sinead ’ Connor. At other times, her voice will remind you of the Celtic melodies of Enya, or of Dido’s enigma. Dolores’s myriadness is emblematic of The Cranberries’ music. It can be political as U2’s, fuse folk elements with rock and jazz like Van Morrison’s, or be plain, frothy, saccharine, like The Corrs’. The musical unpredictability and versatility are perhaps the key to understand The Cranberries’ appeal.

After its remarkable debut album, The Cranberries came up with what gained classic status among 90s releases: the moodier No Need To Argue. Deliberately confrontational but melodically rich, the record sold more than 16.7 million copies.

No Need To Argue explores universal themes like love, death, war and pain. But as with much of Dolores’s songwriting, it addresses these issues with a simplicity and directness that make them endearing.

The opening bars of No Need To Argue signify one of the most recognisable motifs for the mid-90s alternative-rock listener; a peal of a line that introduces Ode To My Family, where Dolores, accompanied by Noel Hogan’s lone guitar, sings in her characteristic alto: “Understand what I’ve become, it wasn’t my design/ And people everywhere think/ Something better than I am/ But I miss you, I miss/ Cause I liked it, I liked it/ When I was out there/ Do you know this, do you know/ You did not find me, you did not find/ Does anyone care?” As the album unfolds, the pattern revealed is simultaneously about memory and reminiscence; tunes of a then that was both pure and fragile and of a bloodied now.

I Can’t Be With You and Twenty One that follow the opening track look back on desire, longing and a sense of awakening that come only with love and loss. But the lilting stretch is deceptively short, and the smash hit Zombie bursts out with raw passion. This was as grunge as The Cranberries would go in 1994 — with jarring, heavy guitars and multiple vocal layers from Dolores — providing the song with a sound that was as feral as Radiohead’s Creep. It is also the most political work in this album, denouncing the futile violence of the Irish strife: “It’s the same old theme since nineteen-sixteen/ In your head, in your head, they are still fighting/ With their tanks and their bombs/ And their bombs and their guns/ In your head, in your head, they are dying.” The political vein continues in The Icicle Melts: a disturbing ditty on a mother’s sorrow about losing her child. The outrage here is scathing, but the music, in a delightful twist, is remarkably restrained.

Gradually, the bitterness fills out in the remaining songs, sweeping away the dregs of hope and redemption. Some of the resentment is personal, such as the heartache in Disappointment that reads like a short poem. The twisted yearning in Yeats’ Grave is supposed to have been inspired by the poet’s unrequited desire for his muse. Loss here remains real, human, and tuneful.

No Need To Argue’s real strength thus lies in its ability to appear what it is not. Beneath the layers of melody, beneath Dolores’s honeyed voice and the perfect harmony of the instruments, lies the disquieting knowledge that all that is beautiful is also infinitely sad.

Uddalak Mukherjee
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