On September 21 Beneath Music release Foburg, the new album by Cathal Coughlan and The Grand Necropolitan Quartet. It’s largely based upon Cathals song-cycle ‘Flannerys Mounted Head’ performed last year in Cork.
CATHAL COUGHLAN
WITH THE GRAND NECROPOLITAN SEXTET
The new album Foburg (Beneath Music) out September 25
What the press said about Cathal Coughlan's 'The Sky's Awful Blue' (2002):
'Another subversive, seductive tract to add to his catalogue of triumphs' Tony Clayton-Lea, Irish Times
'Nobody sings or writes like he does - a croon with a Cork accent delivering words assembled with meticulous attention to detail and character' Andrew Mueller, Time Out
'It's the most fully realised and literate music of the Irish exile's 20-year career... No sing-alongs, maybe, but this handsome voice speaks for itself' Keith Cameron, Q
'The tracks have a live immediacy to them which marks the album out from today's heavy processing, and the lyrics simply demand your attention... A superb album that, if RC marked out of five stars, would merit a six' Kingsley Abbott, Record Collector
September 2006 sees the release of Foburg, the fourth album by ex-Fatima Mansions and Microdisney singer Cathal Coughlan. Comprising 14 new self-composed songs which illustrate an 'unreliable narrative of architectural plastic surgery', which is for the listener to trace or to ignore, it features the Grand Necropolitan Sextet, a group assembled by Coughlan in 2005 for the premiere of his live song-cycle Flannery's Mounted Head.
Based around recordings of the band (guitar/piano/cello/accordion/double bass/drums) playing the songs live in the studio (though with periodic jarring interjections of unreality), the album recalls Coughlan's work with the Fatima Mansions and on his first solo album, Grand Necropolitan (1997).
Coughlan offered the initial fruits of his unreliability to the world as the first post-punk era was ending, through the medium of his partnership with Sean O'Hagan in Microdisney. Together, they created most of their recorded work while living dissolutely in London, recording five albums.
Having alienated some with the melodic gloss of his first group, his second, the Fatima Mansions, refrained from such affronts, being as acerbic and raucous a group as existed anywhere in the world at that time. The group excelled in live performance, though the somewhat random nature of the latter provoked both love and hate in its audiences. Touring heavily in Europe and America through the early and mid-1990's, The Fatima Mansions released four albums, while Coughlan's side-project, the more unexpurgated Bubonique, released two.
Circumstances dictated a solo career after the late 1990's, and Coughlan has released three previous albums in his own name, to critical acclaim internationally, since that time. He has also contributed music to several feature films and, since 2001, has toured extensively, as a vocalist, in musical theatre projects in France.
Coughlan, with the Sextet, will be undertaking his first UK shows in 4 years this autumn. An exclusive and one-off Flannery's Mounted Head performance for Dublin will be announced over the coming weeks.
CATHAL COUGHLAN WITH THE GRAND NECROPOLITAN SEXTET
FOBURG (Beneath Music, UK)
CAT: BNT 020001
RELEASE: September 25, 2006
DISTRIBUTION: Shellshock (via RMG in Ireland)
Cathal Coughlan - Flannery's Mounted Head
Linear Mode
