Mary Coughlan
Album: The Whole Affair: The Very Best Of Mary Coughlan
Label: Hail Mary
Tracks: 35
Website: http://www.marycoughlanmusic.com

This lavishly packaged, generously-stocked two-disc, 35-track set certainly boasts a good majority of the Galway chanteuse's most celebrated recordings from her 25-year career, so it will qualify for the tag "retrospective"; and yet in the final analysis the extravagant and all-embracing boast in its title isn't quite justified, simply because it excludes key tracks like Ride On which took Mary from her more usual jazz ambit deeper into the realms of contemporary folk songwriting. I'd also have liked to've seen a few more tracks from the album where Mary paid homage to her principal inspiration Billie Holiday. But the selection of tracks has clearly been made with care from all but two of her dozen album releases (presumably 1993's Love For Sale and 2002's Red Blues are unrepresented here due only to licensing restrictions). As a bonus we get half a dozen otherwise unreleased live cuts (three from 1993, and three from March this year including significantly intense takes on I'd Rather Go Blind and Love Will Tear Us Apart) to bookend the second of the two discs (which incidentally consists entirely of live recordings).

Whatever your reaction to some of the material Mary covers, there's no denying the seductive passion that's become her hallmark, or her total commitment to the songs. And her vocal versatility enables her to move efficiently and convincingly between a smoky bluesy drawl and visceral rage, supreme tenderness and castigatory wit. Her piano-backed treatment of Heartbreak Hotel on the Live At The Basement is a classic in its own right, but my favourites among Mary's studio successes will always be the likes of Johnny Mulhern's Magdalen Laundry and Mark E. Nevin's A Leaf From A Tree. Stimulating listening is provided by the enigmatic Geldof/Briquette composition The Little Death, while Man Of The World is of course not the Peter Green song but the jittery funk outing from 1990's Uncertain Pleasures (an album whose strangely assured adventurousness belies the impact of the personal demons Mary was facing at the time of its recording).

There are enough great tracks on this collection to spur folks on to catch up on releases they may have missed, especially since the capable arrangements and slick (but not sterile) production values haven't really dated in any way. Even so, I can't really understand the rationale for Jimmy McCarthy's Ancient Rain appearing on both discs (I rather prefer the brilliantly paced live version - one of four tracks culled from 1995's triumphant Live In Galway comeback - despite the occasionally over-dominant sax work on that set). And OK, maybe on her most recent studio album The House Of Ill Repute (2008), Mary overdid the theatrics somewhat on the wider-screen adventure The Whore Of Babylon and the torchy razzamatazz of the title number, but her vocal talents still survive the application of that heavy stage makeup and her performances always retain their essential, professional credibility.

Mary's personal credibility is enhanced by her chatty yet candid booklet essay-cum-reminiscence, which (a touch infuriatingly) also specifically namechecks several songs that don't appear on the set at all. I've also a couple of quibbles with the otherwise commendable presentation; firstly and most seriously, the songwriting credits are absent from the tracklistings (even though some are referred to within the booklet text itself), and secondly the listed Tracks 10 and 11 on the first CD have been transposed on the disc itself.

David Kidman