Seriously, this is batshit crazy.
We’ve all heard religious music, I think. I’m not talking about the really good choral stuff, I’m talking about what one could quite easily call Chaplaincy Rock. One earnest singer with an acoustic guitar, banging out some happy-clappy song about being ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’ or something. I knew a guy like that at my university (Richard Craine, Swansea’s answer to John Denver!), and I even drummed on a few biblical epics he recorded, because he was an absolutely lovely bloke.
Still, musically, you know the drill. It’s fairly standard stuff, yer christian folkster. If you were to see this image, you’d have a fairly clear picture of what to expect:
Just another happy-clappy acoustic guitar singalong, right? Maybe a few quotes from the bible, toe-curlingly bad adaptations of ancient psalms, something like that?
Well, not exactly. Have a listen, and see what you think.
I can’t help but find this utterly unique. This is two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine, and more echo than the Edge in a cathedral. It’s strangely eerie, and actually just a little bit beautiful.
‘Fire’ itself is a sort of minimalist evocation of the joys of celibacy. Not sure I see the appeal, myself, but it’s led to this strange wonder, so fair enough. The rest follows in the same vein, and is, well, quite lovely actually.
I love this kind of thing-music which is strange, and naive, and breaks the rules, because the people making it didn’t really know much about what the rules were in the first place. In its own way, Sister Irene O’Connor is almost as innovative as people like the Durritti Column, or any number of bizarre post-punk acts that cropped up in the aftermath of new wave, in that bold time when the rulebook had not so much been torn up as gobbed on, used to wipe blood off the floor, set on fire and then torn up.
That’s right. Two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine. Punk as fuck.
