Gig review: CMAT at The Piece Hall, Halifax
Results vary amid the ebb and flow of the County Meath singer’s performance in Halifax, but her alt-Americana pop-progression and frenetic vigour wins out in the end.
Has Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson always been ahead of the curve? The County Meath singer and her alt-Americana pop-progression found a dedicated native audience back over the Irish Sea upon her swift emergence from the post-pandemic bubble, both equal parts mournful and camp, laden with Seventies-shine hooks and poetic incision.
But it took another three years for the rest of the British Isles to cotton on, partially thanks to a viral-smash slot on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage last summer.
The star is clearly making up for lost commercial time. This stop in Halifax comes in the midst of a blockbuster summer run that spans festival headline slots and open-air park dates, offering up the biggest shows of her career thus far.
The abrupt novelty of her elevation to a new tier of live fame does not elude her too; at The Piece Hall, she makes frequent reference to the fact this is all wonderfully fresh and vaguely terrifying, flitting to and fro across a multi-tiered evening-show stage – complete with arch staircase – with the air of somebody whose frenetic motions suggest the idea any pause for thought could swallow her whole.
Not that CMAT needs to be worried. Backed by a band who prove as duly adept with prog-tinted interludes as they do with Gaelic-edged hoedowns, she lands to the heady climax of The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, tongue lodged firmly in cheek, and proceeds to climb her catalogue up and down with freewheeling ferocity, puncturing I Don’t Really Care for You’s honey-clean harmonies with feral yelps and delivering theatrical mock-fainting for Have Fun!’s rootsy swagger.
For a sly Where Are Your Kids Tonight?, she points and prods to glitter-crusted signs and leotard-skinned punters at the barrier, each gesture delivered with increasingly preposterous vim and vigour.
Results vary amid the ebb and flow, momentum often slowed to a crawl with a dozen-plus songs stretched to almost two hours.
But CMAT has an ace up her sleeve that wrestles attention back onside – a terrific crack at Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, one that pushes Thompson to the top limits of her range before the ubiquitous blossom-barbs behind Take a Sexy Picture of Me.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen to a girl like me,” she confesses with the quietly affecting Nashville, stripped to its bare bones. But it has – and 5,000 fans are only too happy to remind her.