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With ‘EURO-COUNTRY’, CMAT has made a brilliant, thought provoking, relatable album.
One of the most encouraging features of 20’s pop as a phenomenon is the approach of its stars to the poison chalice of celebrity.
Whether the #MeToo movement was a direct break point or not, some at least of this generation are using their platform not to simper about how lucky they are but instead to confront stereotypes and provoke some much needed deeper thinking.
Like many stars, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson knew what she wanted to be from an early age, going through phases of obsessive teenage content nerdery before her initial venture, an indie band called Red Sea, folded quietly.
The catalyst for the current version of herself was, however, none other than Charli XCX, who told the singer to return both to Dublin and her country rock roots.
It probably reads a little harshly but, reinvented as CMAT, her first two albums – 2022’s debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead and Crazymad, For Me released the following year – were exercises in both finding a home and then setting the stage.
CMAT’s third as a result is the stellar culmination of everything that’s gone before it.
In form, she says, it’s her most country album yet. And with good reason.
Forget rhinestones and rodeos, it’s a genre that’s often deliberately misunderstood by outsiders, representing fans would say a pure distillation of sadness and struggle, a blue-collar thing which prizes emotion above the need to constantly be modernised.
EURO-COUNTRY begins its work before a note is played, the sleeve art depicting a royal-blue clad CMAT emerging from a shopping centre fountain, of itself a nod to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1896 painting Truth Coming Out Of Her Well.
It’s part of a co-package CMAT describes with: “The album title works on three levels: 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.”
This untrivial narrative dominates the title-track; a dazzlingly cinematic framing of the 2008 financial crash and how it tore her local community (and many others across Ireland) apart. The effects almost two decades on are still angrily pervasive.
The causality is articulated in the otherwise uplifting Ready, the sentiment a reflection of the struggle many of those born there now have in maintaining their cultural identity, with the downstream impact a generation of willing emigrants, a story the country knows all too well.
Not all of the inferences are as clear though. An otherwise sombre ballad that provides another willing vessel for that rich, untamed voice, ‘Lord, Let That Tesla Crash’ concerns the death not of the auto makers’ boss but of a close friend, whilst Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’s vivacious soul backdrop frames the constant struggle with misogyny that any woman in the public eye has to deal with.
Even in the 20s, this expectation straitjacket is everywhere, a treadmill effect explored on ‘Running/Planning’; string-laden, the gradually building payload eventually balloons into a fantastic, freewheeling cosmic Americana.
The album peaks though where boundaries dissolve; The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station reveals a slightly unhinged inner and outer monologue (“So okay, don’t be a bitch/The man’s got kids/And they wouldn’t like this”), but the psychedelic freakout here is as thrilling as it is disorienting; nobody else is thinking, or doing it this way.
These were not places even 5 years ago that pop most likely would have chosen not to go to, but this is one of the few remaining places the establishment doesn’t write the rules.
New stardom though means that CMAT can just split from the whole fucking programme, and with EURO-COUNTRY she’s made a brilliant, thought provoking, relatable album which should deservedly hand her the keys to celebrity, whatever she wants that to mean.
