Whatever the future holds for Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, she has already given 21st-century Irish pop one of its defining images by lamenting the fall of the Celtic Tiger while dancing in the fountain at the Omni Park shopping centre in Santry, in north Co Dublin.
She does so during the emotive crescendo to the video for her single Euro-Country, a beautiful sob of a tune that uses melancholic dream-pop to reflect on the hollowing out of Ireland during the crash and the lost years that followed.
It is a period that shaped all our lives, whether we lived through it or not. Yet it has produced little in the way of engaging art. We live in the aftermath of the Tiger’s defanging, yet nobody wants to acknowledge its legacy of cursed futures and ruined lives. But Thompson, who is from Dunboyne, in Co Meath, grasps the historical nettle to devastating effect on Euro-Country.
The title track from her excellent new album, it delivers one of the great jump scares in recent Irish music when she evokes Bertie Ahern and the bubble that could never pop until it blew up in all our faces. “All the big boys / all the Berties / all the envelopes … I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me.”
Why do these lines hit so hard? She delivers them with tremendous emotion – sadness blended with ferocity. But it isn’t as if she isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know about the Bertiefication of the economy. Part of it is surely the sheer novelty. How often do we hear our past sung back to us?
The idea of the Celtic Tiger mall representing a hollowing out of the Hibernian soul is carried through on the cover of Euro-Country, where Thompson – who, like many of us, grew up in the purgatory of the Irish commuter belt – emerges from the fountain at Blanchardstown Shopping Centre.
The image is inspired by Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well, in which a naked woman clambering forth from the darkness symbolises truth struggling to reveal itself in a world clogged with lies. Or, as CMAT told a British newspaper, “magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland – it’s a shopping centre. That’s what I grew up with. A shopping centre.”
Euro-Country the single is a different beast from Euro-Country the album. Her third long-player is more personal and less political, exploring her experiences of body shaming and gaslighting at the hands of the music industry, as well as her attempt to be a better person by curbing her dislike of Jamie Oliver, the chirpy TV chef.
The catchiest moment is Take a Sexy Picture of Me, her response to negative comments on YouTube about her appearance. It fuses her passion for Irish country music – Thompson is audibly au fait with the hit parades of Declan Nerney and Big Tom – with sparkling, melodic pop. Not that she wanted it, but the track has also given CMAT her revenge against the haters by inspiring a TikTok dance trend dubbed, a bit bafflingly, the Woke Macarena.
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That song’s delightful impudence has its echo in the other standout, the Kraftwerk-inspired throb of The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, where she marries an Autobahn-like groove to lyrics about how life can wear you down and make you a hater.
As she seethed at the images of Oliver seemingly plastered all over motorway service stations in Britain (where she has lived since her career took off), CMAT realised that the vitriol had nothing to do with him. It was a product of her own unhappiness and frustration – a lesson to us all.
CMAT has genuine star power, and she is to be praised for overcoming the Irish music industry’s marrow-deep bias against women performers (largely by ignoring it and hopscotching across the Irish Sea). That said, her prominence has had the unhappy side effect of spawning its own mini-genre of “bad CMAT discourse”.
At least it has in Britain, where some commentators have suggested that Ireland is uniquely cursed with slightly rubbish shopping malls, and that the Celtic spirit should be allowed to roam wild and free, unencumbered by capitalism. It’s Éamon de Valera for hipsters, with the logical follow-through that we should reconvene at the crossroads, the better to purify our souls.
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The pacing of Euro-Country is also slightly off, the album fading out somewhat in the second half as one mid-tempo ballad follows another.
These tracks are nonetheless full of emotion: Lord, Let That Tesla Crash is about the death of a friend (“I’d kill myself to find out if you think this song is good”) while the album’s penultimate track, Running/Planning, is beautifully elegiac.
But to wish for more feels immoderate. CMAT has made an album that does what only the best pop can, articulating joy and sadness in the same heartbeat, making us want to cry and dance all at once.
