With Euro-Country, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the artist who performs professionally under the acronym CMAT, is making a statement. The Irish artist is blossoming creatively, commenting on politics and grappling with grief and loss, both individual and shared. It’s all choreographed to a contagious mixture of alt-country, soul-pop, and indie pop sensibilities, producing one of the more striking records of the year.
The unique album name is set in relief on a playful cover with Thompson emerging siren-like from a fountain centered in a postmodern hub of capitalist commerce, under the eye of the Euro, the common currency of the European Union of which Ireland is a part. These contexts situate and shape the record, itself a thick description of place and time with a very danceable beat.
In CMAT‘s Substack newsletter, Thompson writes about the polyvalent title and how it takes life within the 12 tracks of her third album in four years. Euro-Country, as a title and theme, embraces three intertwined contexts. First, she is forging a genre category for her creative output by locating it sonically, geographically, and culturally. Of course, Irish folk music is one of the primary root structures that has nourished (and gone before) the blossoming of what became American country music. The “Euro-” broadens, but does not subsume, the Irish distinctiveness in the larger union and evokes the prolific pop sensibilities of Eurovision.
In its second sense, “Euro-Country” seeks to name a form of loss, pain, and fractured community that she views as a particular type of suffering under modern capitalism, a disquiet she sees as particularly novel in the context of previous history. This unease runs through the record, but is exemplary in the tracks “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station” and “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”.
Thompson’s intelligent, off-beat humor shines on the track, “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”, as the mundane premise of petrol station food endorsed by a celebrity chef meets an utterly infectious tune. What appears at first glance to be a novelty tune reveals itself to be a work of sharp cultural critique to a beat that will have you skipping through the aisles.
CMAT mines the premise as a means to encourage tolerance and empathy. After all, “…the man’s got kids and they wouldn’t like this.” “This” being the exaggerated disdain for Oliver’s image and rep, pushing prepackaged food. Thompson is aware that she is threading a needle with her subtle points. She breaks the fourth wall twice within the song, sensing the argument may be slipping from our grasp. She closes with a flurry of observations that touch on social safety welfare payments, urban-rural differences, and connections in the Irish economic/social landscape, as well as the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that bringing this critique simultaneously implicates her within it.
Jamie Oliver is both a human being and a capitalist commodity. To modify St. Paul’s observation, we find that we are wrestling with “principalities and powers” and also with “flesh and blood”. A critique of late-stage capitalism is always, already an implication of ourselves, capitalist cyborgs as we are. It’s a masterclass in 21st-century malaise, clocking in at five minutes and 23 seconds to an irresistible beat.
In a series of track explanations given to Apple Music, Thompson remarked that, in the midst of making an album about capitalism, the track “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” is a personal confession, as she notes, “I have also been a victim of this.” It is a genuinely unsettling song, mediating sharp feminist analysis through irresistible soul-pop that conjures shades of Nancy Sinatra. Indeed, these boots are gonna walk all over you.
CMAT sings of capitalist commodification and the sexualization of young women in Western society. Lyrics about DIY leg waxing at nine years old under the shadow of female body-shaming and the myth of diminishing beauty. Cutting to the dark heart of Instagram culture, the song’s protagonist seeks anesthesia from the psychic pain that the power of an image can inflict, presenting as young.
However, the cry bites and convicts the vicious society that calls it forth. “Take a sexy picture of me (and make me look 16)” stirs discomfort as it makes plain the sexualization of children and hearkens back to rock and pop songs from male artists that glorified the exploitation of underage girls. As the song progresses, the chorus repeats, with the age getting younger and younger. It’s a blistering critique wrapped in a perfect pop song.
Her third interrelated interpretation of the title is that Euro-Country, of course, refers to Ireland, “[t]he love of my life, the most toxic boyfriend I’ve ever had, the place which has changed so much that I feel sad every day I can’t return the version of it that is in my head.” It explores grief and loss in sophisticated ways that confess that our individual losses are always socially located, inseparable from the soil on which they occur.
Thompson admits that the album emerged in part from a sense of urgency sparked by the loss of a dear loved one and the near-death experience of another loved one in an accident. She unpacks the former in “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”, a mournful acoustic ballad that combines mundane observational awareness and self-deprecating humor to paint a landscape of loss. Thompson’s writing here profoundly excavates the paradoxical nature of grief. The loss is ever-present, and yet we can experience guilt that we aren’t feeling it in a culturally appropriate way. Nevertheless, it manifests itself in regret and often in transferred anger at inevitable change.
In the song, the apartment that she and her loved one once shared now houses a Tesla and a battery charger. This unwelcome addition (a marker of change) is a cipher of the empty promises of capitalist progress to subvert time, entropy, and loss. It becomes a mundane totem of her (and our) grief, building into a call-and-response chorus with her overdubbed vocals responding to the call to let that Tesla crash and with it our inevitable pain.
These themes are explored in greater and lesser measure throughout the LP, on the title track as well as the most overtly country-sounding tune, “When a Good Man Cries”, a honky-tonk tune with fiddle and steel pedal guitar marking time to a two-step exploration of the limits of third-wave feminism and the delicacies of modern relationships. The stark piano note blues on “Janis Joplining” hammer out the slide into self-destructiveness enveloped in the longing for companionship. It offers a Fiona Apple vibe that fades into country pop pleadings.
Like her contemporaries across the Irish Sea and on the Isle of Wight, Wet Leg, CMAT has crafted a standout musical exploration of millennial femalehood in late-capitalist Western society. It is at once catchy and compelling. Naming the spectres that haunt this Euro-Country landscape is the first step toward exorcising them. Along the way, she pushes at the boundaries of country and pop sensibilities with creative verve and a voice that soars and sizzles at all the right moments. Euro-Country is a profound statement and one of the most promising records of the year.
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