Album: Sinéad O'Connor

Sean-Nos Nua, Hummingbird

Sinéad O'Connor's new album is the collection of traditional folk songs that she has put off recording for far too long. Heartbreaking tunes such as "The Parting Glass", "Molly Malone" and "Lord Franklin" are illuminated from within by the fiery purity of that extraordinary voice.

The material may be traditional, but there's nothing straightforward about Sinéad's renditions, which are annotated with typically quixotic interpretations. The love song "Peggy Gordon" is characterised as an expression of lesbian desire, and "The Singing Bird" as a prayer in praise of Jah – which, she claims, "has healing effects upon the singer". It's a bit like one of those modern TV costume dramas that attempt to impose 21st-century attitudes on Victorian narratives – though the core material here is plenty strong enough to withstand whatever insights she brings to it.

With co-producer Donal Lunny tending to the arrangements, the instrumental backdrops are persuasive in the ambient Irish mode Lunny has made his own, with gentle hints of violin and whistle establishing a warm, bucolic atmosphere behind foreground acoustic guitar. Dub effects are used here and there (the UK's premier dubmeister, Adrian Sherwood, is involved with five tracks) to add to the ethereality of the material. The results are particularly effective on "Lord Franklin", where the mistiness evokes both the mystery of the lost Arctic explorer and the plight of the wife left searching vainly for him. Likewise, the ghostly dub echoes of "Paddy's Lament" convey the regret of the emigrant immediately conscripted into Lincoln's army upon his arrival in America.

Regret and misery figure heavily in many of these songs. There is, at least, a happy ending to "Lord Baker", a beautifully understated duet with Christy Moore – though even then it seems begrudged, the listener forced to wait nearly 12 minutes for it. But the more dolorous songs are counterbalanced by others recalled from Sinéad's childhood, such as "I'll Tell Me Ma" (aka "The Belle of Belfast City"), "Báidín Fheilimí" and "Óró, Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile", the latter a lovely, rousing canter in tribute to Grace O'Malley, an Elizabethan warrior-noblewoman.

Devoid of the sermonising and personal problems that spoilt previous releases, Sean-Nós Nua is the best album of Sinéad O'Connor's chequered career, a focused and sensitive work with no unnecessary baggage and plenty of good tunes. My only gripe is that, like so many CDs nowadays, it's just too long: if it had ended with the wistful "The Parting Glass", the natural album-closer, it would have been quite perfect, but a further 20-odd minutes serve only to dilute its impact.