Album review: Fatima Mansions' debut record, Against Nature, finally available to stream 

Originally released by Cork singer Cathal Coughlan and his cohorts in 1989, Against Nature has only just made the jump to the digital age. It was worth waiting for... 

Cathal Coughlan, Fatima Mansions.

So thoroughly has streaming re-configured the music industry, an artist’s absence from Spotify and rival platforms can have the effect of erasing their existence. That has regrettably been the case with Cathal Coughlan’s 1990s art-punks Fatima Mansions, who have faded from view amid a long-running rights dispute that has kept their catalogue out of sight and, alas, somewhat out of mind.

Things now seems to have reached a resolution with Coughlan, London-based and from Glounthaune in East Cork, announcing on Twitter a roll-out of “several streaming reissues”. The first is already with us in the exquisite form of the Mansions’ 1989 debut Against Nature.

 It’s an instant classic, a record that has weathered the decades effortlessly and which springs from the speakers as fully-formed and brimming with shin-kicking brio as it did first time around.

Emerging from the wreckage of Microdisney, the Mansions were at the time regarded as a move away from the mannered indie-funk of Coughlan’s first band. Instead, so it was felt, he was finally free to unleash the demonic forces that had long bubbled beneath.

That is undoubtedly true of later Mansions albums and of venom-spitting singles such as Blues for Ceauşescu. But on Against Nature Coughlan’s songwriting is both sublime and wrathful.

It also haunts us with an incarnation he tried on for size and then quickly abandoned: the one-man, Celtic Pet Shop Boy. That’s the persona he inhabits on the melancholic, synth-powered 13th Century Boy, a pop foray that unfurls like a blend of West End Girls and Flann O’Brien (with a whiff of Game of Thrones as Coughlan exclaims… “let the dark ages begin…now!”).

It’s just one of several Mansions' greats contained here.

Only Losers Take The Bus is both a frantic example of pre-Celtic Tiger Irish indie and a Roy Keane-style sliding tackle on monetarism (the title comes from a Margaret Thatcher quote to the effect that if you were still getting the bus aged 30 you were a failure). And the record channels the Scott Walker within on Big Madness / Monday Club Carol and The Day I Lost Everything.

There would be better Fatima Mansions LPs – Viva Dead Ponies and Valhalla Avenue remain the essentials. Yet never before or since would Coughlan sound either more maniacally capricious or as in tune with the pop romantic within.

 And, however belated, its streaming debut is a cause to celebrate.