Cate Le Bon

Introduction

Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bons seventh record Michelangelo Dying usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up but which in doing so, picks at it too.

Musical Journey

Stalking its maker between Hydra, Cardiff, London and Los Angeles, Michelangelo Dying was, significantly, finished in the Californian desert, the place where much of the record's landscape and heartache exists in her mind. The scenery's desolation blows through the statement album opener Jerome all wide open space, elongated enunciations, and the gnomic instruction to gently read my name / cry and find me here / I'm eating rocks.

Themes of Love and Existence

A record centered on the many states of existence within love and its aftermath, Le Bon found herself surrendering to the abstraction of intense feeling and the grieving of a fantasy. On Mothers of Riches, a letter delivers something wrong before love and existence fold into nothing, while About Time, with its looping drones and percussive synths, starkly announces I'm not lying in a bed you made. And perhaps most evocatively of all, the album's centerpiece Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)? powerfully evokes the simultaneous universality and unknowability of love, and by extension, mortality. Her admission I thought about your mother / I hope she knew I loved her catches devastatingly in the chest.

Musical Arrangement

There is as much unsaid or rather obscured as explicitly stated: Le Bons rich, deeply textural arrangements built up in layers when she didn't have the words, and didn't want to find them. Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound a machine with a heart that has taken shape over her last two records (2019's Reward and 2022's Pompeii) as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout.

Influence of John Cale

And then there's John Cale. His mindset of constantly moving forward and confronting life's experiences through art while maintaining a fierce desire to keep his curiosity alive, even so deep into a career, is a vivid inspiration to Le Bon. He makes a poignant appearance here on the mournful Ride, where he simply sings, unprompted, Its my last ride.

Event Information

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