Album of the Week

Mary Coughlan: "After The Fall" (Big Cat Records)

Dial-a-track code: 1201

It's about time Mary Coughlan was given credit for the ground-breaking body of work she has created during the past decade. Not only does she possess one of the most authentic voices in Irish pop, she also has delivered a series of albums which, in their own way, are as challenging as anything recorded by U2, both musically and lyrically. This is both because of her working relationship with the decidedly post-modern Dutch composer-arranger-producer Eric Visser, and because she has never been afraid to confront issues such as domestic violence, heroin addiction, religious hypocrisy and sexuality.

With After The Fall, Coughlan and Visser produce their moody, late-night masterpiece. Mary has described the album's theme as "woman being fecked out of the Garden of Eden" but, fear not, there is nothing didactic, propagandistic or strident about any of these songs. John Fell of the Work-Around is as much about a male disempowered by unemployment as it is about the woman who now has "another child under my feet". Run Away Teddy, on the other hand, focuses on a woman who feels it necessary to stalk a man.

Marc Almond's tribute to Judy Garland, St Judy, hardly offers light relief, nor does the characteristically muted musical setting of Henry Purcell's When I Am Laid in Earth (Dido's Lament) which closes the album; but then everyone knows that all most great art is dark. And this is great popular art, no doubt about it.