Carol Keogh 'Mongrel City' - Album Review

Well known in Irish music circles from her ’90s stint fronting The Plague Monkeys, not to mention subsequent collaborations with Autamata and Jerry Fish, this is Dublin-based singer Carol Keogh’s debut solo album. Although crowd-funded back in 2012, it has taken until now for Mongrel City to surface.
She is backed on these meticulous songs by her band,The City Fathers, featuring pianist Romy, composer Colin J. Morris, Dave Hingerty of The Frames, and Martin Moran and Elton Mullaly of The Tightrope Walkers. Additional guests include Colm Mac Con Iomaire and Bill Blackmore, who provide the occasional symphonic string and brass arrangements, and the ubiquitous Karl Odlum, who mixed, programmed, played keyboards, guitar and bouzouki.
The musicianship is as tight as you’d expect given the calibre of the players. Keogh’s flawless vocals are highly distinctive. Although it opens with the gentle piano ballad ‘London Song’, it’s actually Dublin that’s the ‘mongrel city’ of the title, as evidenced in such songs as ‘The Relics of Saint Valentine’ (kept in Whitefriar Street Church) and ‘Forty Foot (Saint Michael’s Solution)’. The latter boasts the memorably sung refrain, “Go fuck yourselves in the Forty Foot cold!”
There is an occasional MOR flavour (‘A Place With Real Seasons’, ‘Woman and Girl’), but overall there’s enough bite to justify the feral-sounding album title. ‘Limbo Estate’ takes a deceptively jaunty pop at the legacy of the Celtic Tiger: “See that building on the left there/ It’s been empty quite a while.”
I’d imagine ‘Austin City Limits’ was written after a trip to SXSW, the music festival held in the Texan city. It features gorgeous orchestration, over which Keogh croons about a place, “Where the traffic roars and the eagle soars... and crazy angels hold a mirror to our souls.” The penultimate song ‘Raptors’ is another Romy-led slice of Dublin nostalgia. “Even here I feel imaginary/ as the sun lay down in the Bay.”
An impressive record.
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