Compelling, funny and bursting with confidence, this phenomenal record cements CMAT as a superstar
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, better known by her stage name CMAT, has been making jokes in pop music for three years now. Finding mainstream success chiefly through a song about wanting to be a cowboy – infused as much with deadpan sardonicism as country twang – she is a tour de force in personality (she makes music “for the girls and the gays”), humour (“always the cowboy / never the cow”) and aesthetic (tight, bright, in-your-face). With her third album, Euro-Country, she proves that for all the larking about, her talent and drive are very serious indeed.
This is, quite simply, a phenomenal record. It’s compelling, funny and profound, with Thompson’s powerhouse vocals and playful country stomp at its core. The album arrives a week off the back of a packed festival circuit during which CMAT had thousands of people doing the “Dunboyne Co Meath two-step” and chanting “free Palestine” alike. If these electrifying live shows, where she high-kicks around the stage with her charismatic live band replete with fiddle player, have earned her a truckload of new fans, Euro-Country cements her as less buzzy newcomer and more one of the defining acts of the decade.
The name of the album is a play on “Euro-pop”, that genre beloved by the LGBTQ crowd and reminiscent of the unabashed way in which CMAT conducts herself. But in an ambiguous twist the title track is actually a love letter to and lament for her native Ireland, which she left young to pursue her music career. She opens with a verse in Irish, then eventually the chorus takes over: “My Euro-Euro-Euro-country,” she croons, wishing it worked for her. “I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me,” she sings.
The word play, the melancholy, the sheer feeling: all of it continues apace. She maintains that trademark humour, too: storming lead single “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”, a track conceived in response to online trolls commenting on her weight, is laced with irony and sadness, as she considers with acute self-awareness the forces pushing us – and her – to compulsively seek validation and fetishise youth. Upbeat indie single “Jamie Oliver Petrol Station” is at once abstract and hilariously specific as she works out aloud why seeing Oliver’s face on a poster makes her quite so incensed. “OK, don’t be a bitch / The man’s got kids and they wouldn’t like this” goes the chorus refrain, jumping octaves and building into an explosion of frustration, the articulation of a feeling that remains stubbornly unexplainable, but overpowering at the same time.
Elsewhere, Euro-Country is outwardly melancholic: CMAT mourns the death of a friend and collaborator on “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash” (“I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”) and ventriloquises the narcissistic pain of being young on “Coronation Street” (“I’m 23 and everyone is having fun except for me”). Among all the gems, two particularly expansive, emotive songs stand out: “Running/Planning”, a wistful, resigned song propelled by the simple genius of its titular, throatily sung refrain, evoking both loss and hope, and “When a Good Man Cries”, a mid-tempo ballad that opens with the soar of a fiddle and builds to stadium-filling vocal harmonies, the chorus culminating in a cry of “Kyrie Eleison” (from the Catholic liturgy: Lord have mercy). It makes you want to weep and rejoice at the same time.
What shines through all of it is a burning confidence, cutthroat emotional intelligence and a rare, generous honesty. Thompson is a singular talent, and Euro-Country is the album of the year.
Songs to stream: “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”, “When a Good Man Cries”
