There was a time I used to pray
         I have always kept my faith in love
         It's the greatest thing from the man above
         The game I used to play
         I've always put my cards upon the table
         Let it never be said that I'd be unstable

         It was just my imagination x 3

What was just her imagination?  Prayer?  Love?  Whatever cards she's talking about?  The album cover art is confusing as well, featuring a naked man in a desert with a giant eye looking at him from the sky.  The front cover has him crouched in fear or hiding, while the back has him facing the surprised eye with fists clenched and face raging at the eye. It would seem to symbolize the spectrum of emotions we have under scrutiny, but whose scrutiny?  The opposite sex's?  The press'?  God's?

All in all, while Bury the Hatchet is as good as any of their other albums, it somehow fails to really excite me.  O'Riordan's voice doesn't have quite the seductive hold it once had, and the overall novelty of the band is gone.  The Cranberries might be original when compared to everyone else, but they're becoming too predictably themselves.  --JS

 The Cranberries are one of those bands.  You know, the kind that stand alone.  Nobody can copy them, because 1) they'd look stupid if they did, and 2) they'd never find a siren singer quite like O'Riordan.  The Cranberries can almost do no wrong.  You _know_ every new album is pretty much a sure thing.  

And Bury the Hatchet stays true to form, full of their trademark acoustic strumming and occasional bed of distortion, full bass, emotional keyboard swells that fill every bit of soundspace left when they come in with sweeping grandeur, and of course, O'Riordan's alterna-Celt vocals that swoon and cry and complain and warn and soothe and generally raise many a man's blood temperature.

Most of the songs deal with the ups and downs, weird controlling bonds, and ever-changing natures of relationships, mostly or entirely with the opposite sex.  The language of the lyrics is all straightforward, but the lyrics themselves are too personal and too seemingly schizophrenic for me to figure out what most of the songs are really saying.  For instance, "Just My Imagination" goes: