Album Review: CMAT, Crazymad, For Me

CMAT’s debut If My Wife New, I’d Be Dead sparked a rocket-like trajectory for this most mind-blowing of artists. As well as hitting No.1 on the Irish charts, the record was a Choice Music Prize winner, which also earned the singer a Spotify billboard in Times Square.

For good measure, CMAT did a solo acoustic number, post-Elton, on the Beeb’s Glasto coverage, while the crowning glory is an upcoming three-date stint at Dublin’s Olympia. What happens next? Listening to her sophomore album Crazymad, For Me, the best prediction is to set the controls for the heart of the sun, because this is a goddamn boss record.

Think big. Think Lana Del Rey big. The concept album finds a 47-year-old alternate CMAT constructing a time machine from a dodgy YouTube video to go back and save herself from a toxic relationship. The time travel contraption is wonky, jettisoning our hero in a time desert, eventually crashlanding in 1890s Paris. That big enough an idea for you?!

That epic narrative is soundtracked with – deep breath – indie; 20th century country; Kate Bush sonics; Celine Dion vocals; Gram Parsons’ Cosmic Music; the psychedelic soft-rock of Todd Rungren; and Meatloaf’s epic theatricality. I’m not making this up – the latter quartet of odd bedfellows are all contained in just one track alone, closer ‘Have Fun!’

‘Such A Miranda’, partly set in Copenhagen, maps the toxicity – comparison to exes, body shaming, gas-lighting – before the Queen of Denmark himself, the incomparable John Grant, wades in with a clarion call on the wonderfully titled ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight’.

However, the best titled track on the record, indeed on any record ever made, must be ‘I… Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny’. Elsewhere, the closing vocal on ‘Rent’ raises the hackles on wherever you’re supposed to have them. ‘Whatever’s Inconvenient’, meanwhile, is one of the best allusions (and there have been a fair few) to The Fall’s Mark E. Smith.

And beyond that, CMAT matches the Salford über-miserabilist in put-down couplets, exhibit A being the entirety of album opener ‘California’. Essential listening.

9/10

Out October 13