Editorial Reviews 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.
The Sky's Awful Blue
Music Review:
Music Review
Strauss: Sinfonia Domestica; Suite for Winds, Op. 4
Music: Then And Now: The Music Of The Great Master Continues
The Boris Midney Anthology [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] [Original recording remastered]
The Complete Thom Bell Sessions [Import]
Q Magazine, June 2002
It's the most fully realised and literate music of the Irish exile's 20-year career.
Record Collector
A superb album that, if RC marked out of five stars, would rate a six.
Album Description
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.