CMAT – Irish country-pop singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – writes funny, bone-deep songs about love and other horrors. She also plays her white acoustic guitar like an axe hero. Not for Thompson the smiley, rhinestone strum of the classic Nashville artist. She kicks out, flings her hair, drops into deep lunges, exuding all the energy of a final encore. It’s only the first song.
The slinky California (which rhymes with “don’t say I didn’t warn you”) opens her latest album, Crazymad, for Me, released last month – a concept record about a woman wanting a time machine to stop herself having a disastrous relationship. Named for a Sheena Easton song lyric about infatuation and domesticity, it is among the finest released this year, a confection of Adele-level heartbreak cut with unruly energy and a hammy, everything-everywhere-all-at-once-ness. “I wanted to write Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell for the girls,” she told an interviewer.
