Search - Cathal Coughlan :: The Sky's Awful Blue

Cathal Coughlan, as in his early-1990's outfit Fatima Mansions (and before that in Microdisney), remains a master of wordplay and a confirmed cynic destined to reveal society's ills. This time around, on his third solo album, the Irishman has matched his words and remarkable voice with a sparse treatment of strummed guitars and brushed drums. The mood is often eerie, but plain and effective. On The Sky's Awful Blue, the songs? styles vary from the sprightly boneyard travelogue "Denial Of The Right To Dream" to the 80?s anti-nostalgia of "Goodbye Sadness" (which shifts uneasily between the atmosphere at a scrapyard concert and the feverish cocaine visions of a wayward TV personality, all set to a wistful jazz waltz). The camp drama of "You Turned Me," with a lone clarinet highlighting a lush orchestration, begs to be set to film. Especially with the lyric, "You turned me/So it's the Nobel Prize for you/Now you're looking so stately, pious yet shapely/Parading down the avenue." But then again, with lyrics that vivid, film would almost be redundant. In the grim denouement of "A Drunken Hangman" a failed executor of the State?s judicial will glimpses a salvation which will never be his, years after true reform has ceased to be a realistic possibility for him. Simple piano and strings give way to dissonant guitars as the lyrics underpin the hangman's grim situation, "My clients did not know me long, in wooden rooms stood trembling/The final one I barely touched, for I was barely standing/And in the boarding houses since/I toast my age with lemonade/Recent memories are few/There's just a single fragment of one day." This tragic irony makes for one of the album's most haunting songs.