The Independent (London)
March 9, 1990, Friday

By ANDY GILL

   - SINEAD O'CONNOR

   I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (Ensign CHEN 14)

   Until her recent well-deserved success with ''Nothing Compares 2 U'', I've
always liked the idea of Sinead O'Connor more than her music: the
plain-speaking, self- determining woman, unafraid of putting a few noses out of
joint - in a decade which dissolved, towards its close, into a small puddle of
niceness, O'Connor's bracing attitude made a welcome change. There is a very
fine line, however, between honest complaint and wallowing in misery, and on I
Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, Sinead tramples all over it in ten-league boots.

   The title is symptomatic of the record's weakness: there are more first
person singulars here than on the average Smiths album, the cumulative effect of
which is to cast even the better tracks in a morbidly self-obsessed light. The
predominant themes are of love and ensuing disaffection and the basic
instrumental approach is tentative and ineffectual, as if she didn't want the
music to tread on her precious words, though sometimes this can be to the song's
advantage.

   Elsewhere, one hopes in vain for a noise - any noise - to cover up her less
necessary revelations, as when, in ''Jump In The River'', she refers to ''The
time we did it so hard there was blood on the wall''. This is Sinead's idea of a
love song, an account of devotion extending to the obsessive which makes the
violent mood-swing to the quiet rage of the ensuing ''You Cause As Much Sorrow''
easily explicable. If your idea of fun is a day out at the divorce courts, this
could be just the album for you.