Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying
★★★★
MEXICAN SUMMER
Previously, Carmarthenshire-born Cate Le Bon has interspersed recording with learning carpentry in the Lake District and taking pottery classes in Los Angeles. She made mugs for people ordering 2013 album Mug Museum. Her new album, however, was preceded by the end of a relationship, by heartache and ill health. But if this suggests a tormented record, it’s not there in the music, which is a sweetly meditative expanse, coloured with effects units – a warm bath infused with rare essences of chorus, reverb and perhaps Le Bon’s EarthQuaker Hummingbird pedal, where the product information promises “choppy sawtooth tremolo”.
Opener Jerome leads into the reverberant studio-verse of the Cocteau Twins. Heaven Is No Feeling suggests that, while romance has died, Le Bon is unafraid to dress a bit new romantic. There are sounds that might have featured with Visage and a bass line that hints at Magazine-period Barry Adamson. About Time is an island fantasia of tropical chimes, a softer counterpart to the wonderful 1988 Wire track Kidney Bingos. Yet, even if the start of Mothers Of Riches could be kicking off a track by Yazoo, the album is no simple exercise in guilty-pleasurable retromania.
Le Bon’s voice doesn’t ride high in the mix, but her vocals are full of character – a cool, understated authority, like a wise schoolteacher. The emotive subject matter pokes through in the lyrics, which have to be homed in on like film subtitles. “I’m on the ropes,” she sings in Pieces Of My Heart. “I’d sing love’s story/But nothing’s gonna save it.” On Jerome there’s a request to “Cry and find me here.” The tone is of dispassionate observation – a researcher wondering how we can account for this state, this behaviour? The words are also sometimes oddly funny, as on I Know What’s Nice: “And now I’m older than Lady Diana/Holding out my arms/Starting a fight.”
The contribution from John Cale, a long-standing Le Bon inspiration, amounts to grace notes – a few vocal interjections in Ride. Le Bon’s band are made up of friends and associates, including saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood and drummer/percussionist Valentina Magaletti. The overall mood is of sonorous contemplation, but with the ruminative feel interrupted by some lovely melodies on which Le Bon can hang that gorgeously sombre voice. Against her own inclinations, Le Bon has made an album about that most familiar of pop tropes, love. She’s described the album as an attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up. The photo has been taken. Despite the subject matter, it’s a beauty.
Michelangelo Dying is out September 26 on Mexican Summer
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
1. Jerome
2. Love Unrehearsed
3. Mothers Of Riches
4. Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?
5. Pieces Of My Heart
6. About Time
7. Heaven Is No Feeling
8. Body As A River
9. Ride (featuring John Cale)
10. I Know What's Nice
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