Cathal Coughlan

★★★★ Song Of Co-Aklan DIMPLE DISCS. CD/DL/LP/MC

Microdisney and Fatima Mansions singer’s first new album since 2010.

Cometh the apocalypse, cometh the man. Cathal Coughlan has been lamenting personal and societal folly with golden-voiced brio since 1980, but his low profile these past 10 rupturous years was evidently an epic exercise in loin girding. This sixth solo album’s opening title track represents the apex of Coughlan’s craft: an aural Bayeux tapestry for our bitter and twisted age (“Feeling affronted? Blame the unwanted!”), its prismatic lyric weaving an allusive litany of bêtes

noires – India’s PM Narendra Modi; Robert Nairac, the British solider/spy killed by the IRA in 1977 – around synthetic Northern soul euphoria. Its daunting standard is maintained, via theatrical grotesques Passed Out Dog and My Child Is Alive, while Owl In The Parlour and Let’s Flood The Fairground refine the younger man’s intemperate instincts with heightened perspective. Erudite and tender, Song Of Co-Aklan definitively affirms Coughlan’s place amid Ireland’s poetic pantheon.