February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Although the biggest commercial success the Waterboys achieved was the hugely popular “Whole of the Moon” single, from their 1985 breakthrough album, “This Is the Sea,” their star has never really dimmed for their Irish fans.
More than 30 members have come and gone since the early 1980s, but the current team is composed of band stalwarts Steve Wickham (on fiddle and mandolin) and Richard Naiff (on keyboards) and the perennial Mike Scott, who writes the songs. The result is a much more slimmed down and mellowed back-to-basics folk sound, an approach the MTV generation call “unplugged.”
Throughout their restless career their sound has alternated between electric and acoustic, producing surprise, delight and moments of occasional transcendence for their listeners. That’s certainly the case with this latest collection of, in Scott’s own words, “one Irish reel and 11 spiritual-based songs.”
Scott’s long dalliance with the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community located in the countryside between Inverness and Aberdeen in Scotland, is evident in the album’s title, “Universal Hall” (named after a theater run by the organization), and in the upbeat, opening anthem, “This Light is for the World.” With the welcome return of fiddler Wickham, the band’s original folk ambitions resonate fully once again and they also find time to rock out.
“I’ve been spending time here over the years,” Scott of Findhorn, where the album was recorded. “The place and its people live according to the tenants of philosophers like Rudolph Steiner. But each individual pursues his or her own spiritual course. Essentially the premise is to live from a spiritual center, without espousing a particular creed or path.”
In the community, and in the music it inspired, the Waterboys have created their simplest and most explicit musical expression to date. In contrast to the grand Ossian wildness of “This Is the Sea,” the visions of “Universal Hall” are intimate, internal, on a human scale. Much of the album is sparse — almost Spartan at times — with piano, guitar and minor percussive shuffles predominating until the animating violin of Wickham takes full flight.
The band has never fallen into clich