Having dragged us into the nightmare of Irish history, the Cranberries summed it up with the withering dismissal "It's the same old theme since 1916" and then left us to find our own way out. "Zombie" was a paradox: a political song about the trap of politics, a historical song that fought its way out of history's suffocating grasp. Nothing else on "No Need to Argue" matched "Zombie" (what could?), but the single was the band's declaration that they weren't about to let much get in their way.

The shock of their just-released third album "To the Faithful Departed" is that, by their own choice, they are utterly hemmed in by the barricades "Zombie" blasted through. The Cranberries have become pamphleteers. We listen to what they have to say here because their sense of pop craft is perhaps sharper than ever. There's none of the melodic splintering of numbers that sometimes caused the first two albums to skid off course. The hooks carry the songs through, but that only makes the puerility of the lyrics worse.

The first single,"Salvation," gets you bobbing to the beat almost before the song's gotten under way (thanks largely to the drumming of Fergal Lawler who acquits himself admirably throughout), only to leave you open-mouthed as O'Riordan sings, "To all those people doin' lines/Don't do it, don't do it/Inject your soul with liberty, it's free, it's free."

And that's one of the livelier moments. With songs whose titles tell the tale ("War Child," "Bosnia") O'Riordan feels compelled to share every pensee that casts a cloud across her diminutive brow. She even interrupts a song about her wedding day to ask, "What of Kurt Cobain?/ Will his presence still remain?" It's unbelievably pompous of O'Riordan to diminish Kurt Cobain's contributions as being ephemeral while ladling out socially conscious gruel that will sound like yesterday's news two months from now.

It's clear from both the songwriting credits and the image the Cranberries have chosen to present that O'Riordan's is the band's guiding sensibility. And though she sings "Harassment's not my forte" on one number, hectoring is. Throughout "To the Faithful Departed" she berates us for going on with our pitiful, insignificant lives while big things -- you know, war, poverty, the whole global chaos bit -- are happening. "There's a war in Russia and Sarajevo too" she sings on "Free to Decide," "So to hell with what you're thinking . . . You should leave your life behind." But is there anything more insulated than the fantasy of being able to leave your life behind for some grand cause? O'Riordan is bucking for rock and roll sainthood here. She's handing down the word from on high, though she thinks we're not really worthy to receive it. On "To the Faithful Departed" she is the world.

That's what makes "I Just Shot John Lennon" not only the most appalling song here, but the most revealing of O'Riordan's cushy fantasies. On the Cranberries' last American tour, O'Riordan performed some numbers on a platform high above the stage. She wasn't just putting herself above her band (whom she barely acknowledged), but above us, too. "I Just Shot John Lennon" tells you why: because you never know what sort of slob is waiting out there in the dark. "In 1980 he paid the price," O'Riordan sings, "He should have stayed at home/He should never have cared," and it's clear she means that Lennon should never have cared about trying to rejoin public life, never have cared about us.

On "To the Faithful Departed," it's us, having the gall to go on living while people are dying in Chechnya and Sarajevo, who are as "sad and sorry and sickening" a sight as Mark David Chapman. Chapman thought that John Lennon had become just another rich, hypocritical, out-of-touch rock star. You can imagine him listening to the contempt in Dolores O'Riordan's voice throughout this album and having all his crackpot notions about how little audiences matter to rock stars confirmed. That is, if he isn't grooving on having finally, in some ways, made the charts.