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Album Review

The Fatima Mansions
Viva Dead Ponies (Reissue) Sony BMG

Article written by Matt H - Oct 22, 2007

I wish I were able to start this talking about the re-issue of one of the most influential albums of the last two decades - but who would I be kidding? Rarely short of critical acclaim, though of the sort that tended to stop short of adulation, the Fatima Mansions, like everything that the rather fabulous Cathal Coughlan has ever done, didn't really win the hearts and minds of the world at large. Which is a travesty really. Fingers crossed that this reissue, granted for some reason linked to the estimable Kitchenware's 25th birthday, might just redress a tiny bit of the balance.

For all that I love Microdisney and Coughlan's subsequent solo work, the Fatima Mansions were where the music really matched the eloquent ire of his words, and a few glorious individual moments aside, Viva Dead Ponies where the whole was at its best. Relevant, outraged and unashamedly political, Coughlan has always had a mighty turn of phrase (I can't start quoting here or I'll never stop). But he has rarely been partisan and never preachy - his lyrics are either beautiful illustrations of character and place or impressionistic collages of fact, half-truths and rumour which make sense on a purely visceral level. The songs on Viva Dead Ponies excel at the former - there's the diminutive bossman of Mr Baby, the terrifying mundane violence of the Door-to-Door Inspector, the ruthless, selfish wanderer of A Pack of Lies, and Jesus reincarnated as a Muslim grocer in the title track. It's a dark underbelly of a world that is depressingly still familiar today - set to a wide variety of music, covering out-and out balladry, electro-pop and screaming electronic metal - even, on the White Knuckle Express, mangled caberet - all glued together with odd short casio and glockenspiel instrumental and bursts of opera. It's really still quite remarkable.

Generously enough though, there's a second disc compiling other highlights of the Mansions' 5-year existence. Anyone around at the time ought to have vague recollections of the pounding electro-billy of Only Losers Take the Bus and the magnificent, coruscating rage of Blues for Ceausescu - two utterly essential songs. They're matched by any number of articulate, sardonic explosions of glorious multi-layered noise that's often a lot of fun (especially the Tory-sleaze baiting Motorheadisms of Humiliate Me). And this is all before I've really mentioned the voice. For all his unparalleled lip-curled snarls and screams, Coughlan's is at heart a beautiful Celtic baritone, with echoes of Scott Walker and John Cale but all his own. There's plenty to showcase it here, not least the gorgeous Behind the Moon. Frankly since the Fatima Mansions' demise there have only been echoes of this level of intelligently engaged urgency and passion - from a Mclusky here to, well I'm sure there's someone else there, I just can't think of them (Desaparecidos at a push?). I hesitate to say that this reissue is the sound of the best of bands at the peak of their powers, because that will burden it with unfair expectation and, not being an easy listen, it may still baffle many. But it's true, true I tells you! Just get it.

Links:
http://www.cathalcoughlan.com

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