Well, that was an interesting first week of 2021. It feels like someone has taken 2020 to a cheap photocopier and the resultant replication is a worse version than the original, and almost impossible to define.
However, like 2020, it seems likely that music will be my saviour. Singles wise, there have already been two magnificent tunes in the shape of Paint & Feathers from Dumb Poets and Forever in My Heart from Mark W Georgsson.
The latest single to have a huge impact on my listening pleasure this year is the first new music in 10 years from the musical genius that is Cathal Coughlan, he of Microdisney, Bubonique (with the late Sean Hughes) and Fatima Mansions fame, following those with five solo albums.
Cathal’s music has been very special to me through the years, none more so than when attending two momentous gigs in Glasgow’s King Tuts within months of each other (March and May ’91) during the Fatima Mansion, at one of the gigs having a monitor fall from the stage onto my toe – thankfully the Tuts stage isn’t that high…
The welcome return of the Irish troubadour’s rich velvety baritone comes in the form of the single Song of Co-Alkan, a collaboration with Luke Haines (The Auteurs & Black Box Recorder) and Grand Necropolitan Quartet, preceding an album of the same name.
The single is in classic Coughlan style, with the sometimes surreal, almost nonsense-like lyrics, that he is known for. On closer listen these resonate and become synonymous with and poetically aligned to the near dystopian times we are living through delivered over a throbbing bass line, the song building and layering guitar and electronic squall.
If the single is an indicator of what is to come on the rest of the album, my appetite is well and truly whet. The list of albums due this year and are filling me with the feeling of a kid on Christmas Eve increases once more…
Bandcamp LINK