In the spirit of the dark rainy week here in Southern California, I’ve got another haunting beauty of a song on my mind. Cathal Coughlan has long been one of my favorite songwriters and performers and I still remember when I got my hands on his limited-release (that’s a whole other story) debut solo album, Grand Necropolitan. The record arrived in my mailbox (I had had to order it directly from a tiny label in the UK) and I was a bit bemused by the cover art, a pixilated take on the classic Deutsche Grammophon album designs. But as soon as I played the first track – the 8-minute tale of a characters like the man with the nozzle of a pressurized pain gun embedded in his leg – I was captivated. This music was unlike anything he’d done before and while some fans were put off by his having left behind the more brutal sonic assaults of his (not quite at that time) defunct band Fatima Mansions, I found the expansive openness of his new material captivating. It’s an approach he would perfect on his next album, the flawless Black River Falls and continue on with on The Sky’s Awful Blue (a record I had the pleasure of releasing in the US on the indie label I ran with a couple great friends). But I still find myself returning to Grand Necropolitan in all its twisting, interlude-laden oddness. Unbroken Ones is possibly the most straightforward song on the record and features some of CC’s most haunting and intimate lyrics, sung in his rich voice over fingerpicked guitar and jarring feedback:
I gave up disaster, burned off clouds of doubt that I might shine
Ocean heart for you
I gave up the hungers without names
Schooled on a leash as decoyed pain
Ocean heart for you
And though my past still speaks through me
It paralyzes me and makes my self-hate entire
Your smile is the standard, the measure of forever until when we’ll be unbroken ones
Listen for yourself:
