Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Mary Coughlan begins Repeat Rewind, her first studio album since 2020, in fine style: on a weekend romance in Brussels, her memories reeling back through the years to her childhood in Galway’s decidedly non-swinging 1960s. “Daddy, can I go out?” — “Ask your mam.” Between the moules-frites and recollections, another set of memories creeps in: tango music seeping out of a church hall; a “one-legged guy from Argentina” lurching at her, and leaning on each other they take to the floor.This mixture of reverie and fleeting encounter is characteristic of the Irish singer, whose work slides between folk, jazz and blues — and indeed tango: 40 years ago her earliest calling card, a cover of “Nobody’s Business”, was infused with the unlikely sounds of Buenos Aires. Other songs here are as strong as anything from her career. “What If I Do” initially sounds as if it will be too airy for its own good. “Holding my breath and my tongue, I don’t want to get this wrong,” she sings to Pete Glenister’s dabs of electronica. But then the chorus is wrapped in the kind of irresistible hook that makes you think the song must be an old standard. “Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s you . . . What if I don’t? What if I do?” On “Marital Bliss”, Coughlan embarks on a finger-clicking donnybrook with Dave Browne, the singer of Dublin band Picturehouse. “You’re getting kinda lazy with compliments and stuff,” she chides. “Darling, where has this all come from?” he asks. And so on, griping verses bookended by reconciliatory choruses.A reading of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” falls short of some of her covers, which have owned songs so securely that you forget that Mick Jagger or Christy Moore ever existed. But the closing “More Like Brigid”, a frustrated, hollow blues stomper about gender roles, is classic Coughlan. “So,” she confides, “here’s the craic . . . Eat your heart out!”★★★★☆‘Repeat Rewind’ is released by Strange Brew
