Lost In The Former West

Fatima Mansions: “Lost In The Former West” (Radioactive Records)

“It’s been a while since you said heil, you CIA bred necrophile.” Ah yes, when you find yourself leaping around the room and singing along to lines like that, it can only mean one thing. Fatty days are here again.

The sleeve of Lost In The Former West finds a heavily-pansticked Cathal Coughlan in a Liberace mood, swathed in an ermine cape, his fingers bejewelled with rings the size of hubcabs. By his side, Aindrias O’Gruama looks sexy and comely in full and very fetching chauffeur’s livery. Join them as they take us through the plughole, into the U-bend of life under the new world order. Call it Deathstyles Of The Poor And Obscure.

This is both Fatima Mansions’ most accessible and most ambitious release yet. It revisits virtually all the bases that the band has touched during its previous four albums but maintains a cohesion and easy-appeal throughout. More than anything else, it is the sound of a group who feel that their time has finally come.

Impeccably produced, primarily by ex-Talking Head, Jerry Harrison, with a little help from Gil Norton and regular man-about-the-Mansions Ralph Jezzard, the album boils the Mansions’ aural recipe down to its marrow. In many ways, it is closer to their first album, Against Nature, than it is to anything they’ve done since. All the usual elements are here – fury, Gothic pathos, great tunes – but somehow they have never before seemed so instantly infectious.

For instance, the opening volley of ‘Belong Nowhere’, ‘The Loyaliser’ and ‘Popemobile To Paraguay’ are among the most ferocious Fatima anthems to date but they are delivered with a clarity and crispness that has been strategically avoided in the past. Where, previously, Coughlan has preferred to force the melodies of his fast songs to strain free from a mesh of squalls and distortion, he now discharges them with no strings attached. This time round, the ballistics are all in his voice.

But there’s a new note of weariness in Coughlan’s singing too, particularly on the brilliant ‘Brunceling’s Song’ and the eerie ‘I Will Walk Your Way’ which enhances the slow smouldering fuse without which the eventual detonations would lose much of their impact.

Throughout Lost In The Former West, there is a pervasive subtlety that on its own should stand as an object lesson to some of the more widely-lauded ragemeisters. That plus a sense of humour, a sense of proportion and, of course, a sense of songwriting ability. Are you listening, Henry Rollins?

Cathal Coughlan continues his homage to Scott Walker with a haunting version of ‘Nite Flights’, a track he wrote under his real name of Scott Engel. David Bowie actually had a stab at this song on his last album but it is a testimony to how Coughlan has evolved as a vocalist that he manages to capture both its weirdness and sheer poppiness, dual qualities which were lost in the bombast of Bowie’s rendition.

As always with a Fatima Mansions album, there is much more that could be said and at least two dozen lyrical couplets that deserve quoting for their comic value alone. However, my essential advice couldn’t be simpler or more to the point: if you are going to get lost this year, you just have to get Lost In The Former West.

• Liam Fay