She may unite two of the mid-2020s most pervasive cultural trends \u2013 the so-called \u201cgreen wave\u201d of zeitgeist-dominating Irish actors, authors and musicians; and the irreverent embrace of country music by pop stars such as Beyonc\u00e9, Lana Del Rey and Chappell Roan \u2013 but you don\u2019t need to spend much time in the company of 29-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson to realise she\u2019s a total one-off. Who else would come out with a chugging indie earworm called The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, in which an irrational hatred of the celebrity chef and his Shell deli franchise (\u201cThat man should not have his face on posters!\u201d) leads her to grasp frantically at slippery observations about social anxiety and her own aesthetic sensibilities? Even the most conventional song on Euro-Country, the cool R&B-pop of Running\/Planning, is laden with bonkers lyrics about creating an imaginary boyfriend, ripping his head off and then promising to buy said head a Nintendo and \u201call the games\u201d.<\/p>\n
The artwork for Euro-Country. Photograph: CMATBaby\/AWAL\/PA<\/p>\n
Thompson \u2013 who won instant acclaim in Ireland with her 2022 debut If My Wife New I\u2019d Be Dead, and cemented her status in the UK with its Mercury-nominated follow-up Crazymad, for Me \u2013 is not kooky in the manic pixie dream girl sense, or leftfield in an alienating radical way. Instead, she is deeply relatable in her weirdness. On the saccharine soul of Take a Sexy Picture of Me, she captures the formative nature of toxic femininity by recounting an attempt to wax her legs with tape aged nine, while on Ready she\u2019s mired in the message \u2013 pedalled by Gwyneth et al \u2013 that women must engage in infinite self-perfection at the expense of actual living. In Coronation St, waiting for her life to start, over strummed guitar, she feels like a soap barmaid with no lines. In fact, Corrie gets more than one shout-out on her third album, which is enriched by a jumble of cultural references \u2013 Dorian Gray, Veruca Salt, Calpol, Kerry Katona \u2013 both a sign of camp humour and a voracious mind seeking to explain and evoke thoughts that exist just beyond the fringes of everyday conversation.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
CMAT: Euro-Country \u2013 video<\/p>\n
One of these emotional landscapes is also geographical: among Euro-Country\u2019s major preoccupations is Thompson\u2019s complicated feelings towards her homeland. Combining mundane regional commerce and gaudy, chintzy folk art, the album cover prods at Ireland\u2019s mystical reputation by depicting the musician stepping out of a town centre fountain in hyper-saturated colour. But then she\u2019s engaging in droll romanticism of her own on opener Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy, which applies an echoey filter and gently building synth backdrop to a recording of a man discussing wind conditions, suffusing his words with a soporific warmth that is at once familiar and otherworldly.<\/p>\n
One song later, on the title track and inarguable peak, Thompson is fusing a potted history of the country\u2019s economic woes (\u201cI was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me\u201d) with sour reminiscences about her own stultifying adolescence in County Meath (\u201cAll the mooching \u2019round shops, and the lack of identity\u201d), all of it relayed in a mixture of beautiful, vaguely yodelly tones, Lana-esque melancholia and chipmunk backing vocals that recall Norwich experimentalists Let\u2019s Eat Grandma. And it\u2019s funny. And it\u2019s catchy.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cI waited for love \/ With a cricket bat,\u201d begins When a Good Man Cries, a gorgeous dirge that tempers brash fiddle and strains of cheesy 90s country-pop with sublime Fleetwood Mac-style harmonies. Miraculously, Euro-Country\u2019s distinctive lyrics never upstage the music, which is often subtle but just as fastidiously inventive \u2013 from Janis Joplining\u2019s maximalist blues to Tree Six Foive\u2019s propulsive goth-folk \u2013 and always a great showcase for Thompson\u2019s lovely voice.<\/p>\n Still, Euro-Country is exceptional because of how Thompson constantly strives \u2013 sometimes wryly, sometimes earnestly, always entertainingly \u2013 to capture messy psychological entrails that don\u2019t fit the template of the typical pop song. Pared-back indie number Lord, Let That Tesla Crash is a tribute to an old housemate who died, but any threat of mindless sentimentality is instantly eviscerated as Thompson admits: \u201cI don\u2019t miss you like I should.\u201d Her grief is tangled with emotional avoidance and unreciprocated affection (a recurring theme); her pain sublimated into fury directed at the Tesla owner who has parked outside their old home. It\u2019s classic CMAT: a roiling sea of charm, chaos, substance, sadness and piercing insight \u2013 and yet more proof this nascent star is in a class of her own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She may unite two of the mid-2020s most pervasive cultural trends \u2013 the so-called \u201cgreen wave\u201d of zeitgeist-dominating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-100630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}