What, or who, springs to mind when you hear the word ‘hangdog’? Paul Giamatti in Sideways? Lee Hazlewood’s bloodhound eyes and fearsome moustache? Or Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT, whose gnawingly bittersweet balladry won over TikTok teens and 6 Music parents alike before her barnstorming Glastonbury performance catapulted her to a wider audience still?
It’s not hard to see why. Thompson’s melodies are so mellifluous that it frequently takes a perfect comic beat for her knockout lyrics to register, while she cloaks her own flavour of hangdog in a sparkling layer of camp. Even the title (and cover!) of her third album, Euro-Country, carries the pleasing smack of kitsch.
If such a concept puts you in mind of, say, beery Swedish bluegrass-techno merchants Rednex, fear not. “The album title works on three levels,” Thompson says, “the kind of country music I make, the fact that Ireland is a European country, a country run by the euro, and capitalism is one of the worst things to ever happen to us.”
You could also argue that the record’s lyrical concerns are particularly European, with their explorations of ressentiment, schadenfreude, and kummerspeck – “I lost a little weight, yeah, and gained it back when I missed him.” Thompson sings as the title track blooms into life. Over a swooning pedal steel, she draws sharp lines between her personal turmoil and the devastating 2008 collapse of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. Her Irish accent shines through the Great Plains plaintiveness of her cathartic, expressive keen as she leads us on a tour through a Dublin decimated by shopping centres and empty estates.
‘When A Good Man Cries’, on the other hand, nods to Thompson’s complex relationship with Ireland in more musical terms, pasting the wounded scrape of a trad-folk fiddle onto a Nashville skyline of a backdrop. “You know what I’m like, you don’t deserve it,” she lilts reluctantly, crowning herself ‘the People’s Mess / Dunboyne Diana’. With that wonderful voice and those jaded, sober words, she’s more like the Lucinda Williams of Weltschmerz.
“I would consider this my most country record, as in, steeped in the tradition of country,’ says Thompson of her ambitions for the album. ‘But neither Oli [Deakin, her producer] or I wanted to make something that we’d heard before.” Perhaps this willingness to colour outside genre lines explains why her appeal is broad as her style is distinctive, with the real proof of that coming through the record’s standout singles – none more so than the fabulous ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’.
“That song is me calling out anyone who criticised my weight or how I looked,” says Thompson of ‘Sexy Picture’. You could imagine Paul Heaton applauding the way its easy-listening arrangement and abundant hooks (really, this is not so much an earworm as an ear-limpet) mask corrosive insecurity. But while his most famous ode to body positivity, ‘Perfect 10’, is sweetly and saucily uncomplicated, ‘Sexy Picture’ has something darker to say. A pin-sharp commentary on the double-edged infantilisation and validation sold to women through mass media sexualisation, it would have John Berger nodding in grim recognition.
‘Running/Planning’ is no less feminist in its intentions, which Thompson describes as “an abstracted view of societal pressure on women […] you start dating someone, you get engaged, you get married, you have kids etc etc etc… everything has to follow this linear pattern“. With this in mind, you can see it as a descendant of Talking Heads’ immortal ‘Once in a Lifetime’, but unlike David Byrne, Thompson has bluntly diagnosed why such conformity-breeding mauvaise foi arises – “the minute you don’t follow that path, your mam starts giving out to you“. All that angst beams forth beautifully through the mingled bliss and ennui of her soaring vocals.
But the wider world isn’t the only target of Thompson’s disappointment. Take ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, which opens with a splash of hilarious pettiness against the grating TV chef before she unexpectedly redirects her anger, recriminating herself for such misplaced hatred. “The man’s got kids, and they wouldn’t like this,” she repeats between motorik rhythms and measured, chiming bursts of kosmische piano.
As two of the record’s most affecting cuts show us, there is real tragedy as well as comedy in Thompson’s self-examination. The title of ‘Coronation St.’ may not even be the most Mancunian thing about it, as the guitar and mandolin lope along with such shimmering sorrow it’s impossible not to think of Johnny Marr’s time in the Smiths (the Irish-identifying Marr’s plangent compositions always seemed indebted to Celtic folk). Meanwhile, the lyrics serve as a heartbreaking laundry list (isn’t that more EastEnders’ deal?) of all the ways she feels she’s failed.
Then there’s the extraordinarily moving ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’. Beginning with a pun about Irish pronunciation, the humour slowly and delicately gives way to some of the finest, most open lyrics Thompson has ever written, reckoning relentlessly with her self-concerned emotions after the sudden and unexpected loss of her dear friend Jo.
Even the lighter moments on the album have the capacity to surprise. It might have been too much to hope that ‘Tree Six Foive’ would be a Dublin-accented cover of Charli XCX’s Bacchanalian hyperpop banger ‘365’ (Thompson began her music career trying to imitate Charli’s style), but it’s pleasant to discover that instead, it’s a gather-round-the-piano singalong stomper which burns with communal spirit. The half-rapped bridge of ‘Ready’ bears a more overt kinship to modern pop, but it slots seamlessly between the drifting currents of timeless soul that constitute its verses, standing as a monument of hope amidst the doubt and fear expressed elsewhere on the record.
Despite the raw territory she so often charts, warmth and generosity always win the day in Thompson’s world. Closing track ‘Janis Joplining’ rounds off the album with one final cry for connection, her vocals taking on the sassy-savvy cadence of 90s alt-rock over a stumbling barroom piano until everything fractures open into grand, broken theatricality.
With the song finally collapsing into the sort of drowsy liquid bass which Kate Bush or Japan poured all over their records in the 80s, Euro-Country leaves a bright, clear afterglow. In a world and a year where so much pop music alienates and estranges, this bold, big-hearted epic of love, loss, and politics is likely to leave listeners young and old feeling that little bit less alone. CMAT’s Euro-Country welcomes us all as citizens, and after giving this a spin, you won’t want to leave.
Euro-Country is out now via AWAL Recordings – order here
CMAT is currently on tour – see all dates and book tickets here
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Review by Poppy Bristow
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