CMAT
Crazymad, For Me (AWAL)
CMAT (aka Irish singer-songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) is very good. Very, very good indeed. As is her new album, Crazymad, For Me, which follows up her award-winning debut last year. Opening with California, which sounds like it should exclusively be played in smoky rooms, CMAT has created something brilliant. She’s spoken about how her second album is probably going to be “objectively … the best album I ever make,” and it shows.
The likes of the almost-ballad Vincent Kompany, the heartbreaking Rent, and the Kate Bush-esque I… Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny strut straight into the highlights of her discography so far. Yet there are also singles such as the incredible John Grant feature Where Are Your Kids Tonight? and the obscenely catchy, fiddle-bedecked Have Fun!, showing the best of CMAT’s undeniable talent as a songwriter.
It’s perfectly possible that this is, in fact, just CMAT’s world and we’re just living in it: if so, what a world to live in.
words JOSHUA WILLIAMS