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Track Listings
| 1. Chardonnay |
| 2. Caught in the Middle |
| 3. La Bague |
| 4. Weightless Again |
| 5. Only a Fool |
| 6. Ocean |
| 7. Arglwydd Dyma Fi |
| 8. If You're Looking For Love |
| 9. The Good in Goodbye |
| 10. Gypsy Songs |
| 11. All My Trials |
Formerly down in the dumps, having purportedly lost her self-confidence and media-friendly effervescence in a thick fog of anxiety, exhaustion, booze and fags, the ebulliently titled Cock-A-Hoop finds the former pretty face of Catatonia getting folksy with the musical natives in Nashville and bouncing back from the ignominy of rehab with a new, rootsy agenda, a clear head and not a remaining care in the world. She's married, she's going to have a baby and Cock-A-Hoop is a record that shines with the good-time aura of new-found contentment, so much so that the jovial banjo-plucking delirium of "Louisiana" wouldn't sound out of place as incidental music in The Little House on the Prairie. Boozy former demons are beaten to death with acoustic instruments--"Chardonnay", a song penned (but never recorded) by Roger Cook and former Strangler Hugh Cornwell, seems to jolly along in summer straw boaters with its clockwork banjo and village band woodwind--but the songs' appreciative narrative disguises contempt for her former dependencies.
Along with the ragged vocal swagger of growly slacker-folk number "The Good in Goodbye"--on which Matthews spits-feathers and approximates the inebriated slurring of a female Shane Macgowan--it succeeds in sticking two fingers up in the general direction of the past. In light of which, Catatonia fans with inflexible musical tastes will have to draw crumbs of comfort from potential single "Only a Fool" or else learn to tailor their preferences towards a Welsh language translation of a 19th-century American Methodist hymn ("Arglwydd Dyma Fi" has gorgeously shimmering pedal steel guitar), a Cajun ode to feeling like a castrated chicken or the Bahamian spiritual "All My Trials", as previously performed by the likes of Roger McGuinn, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. That said, longstanding fans will find Matthews' wayward vocal mewing as endearingly crackers as ever. And it would take a rigid cynic of the highest order not to admit that Cock-A-Hoop is a very welcome change of scenery. --Kevin Maidment
Saturday Times
"a welcome return 4/5"
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