Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon's 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.
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."
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.
There is as much unsaid -- or rather obscured -- as explicitly stated: Le Bon's 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.
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, "It's my last ride...".
What we're left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, "each one a shard of the same broken mirror" -- shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, "No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it."
Though in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, applying a singular skill and instantly identifiable sound to albums by the likes of Wilco, Devendra Banhart and St. Vincent's Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with years-long collaborator Samur Khouja. "There's this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you'll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio".
To a similar end her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. "Over the years of working together Euan has uncoupled his playing from the traditional to house the emotional frequency I have asked of him. On this record especially, it's the voice that takes over when words are too concrete for the feeling." He's joined here by similarly close friends - Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion.
An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. "The characters are interchangeable" concludes Cate, "but at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself."
~~~
It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon's fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. "There's a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night," she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers -- the first piano she had ever owned -- for company, "windows closed to absolute-ly everyone", and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider's back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.
Grandfather-clock-like chimes occupy the first few bars of opener 'Miami', heralding the commencement of an album largely concerned with a period of significant per-sonal change. Not only is the city of the song's title the location of a seismic shift in Le Bon's life, but it is also, she suggests, faintly ridiculous for someone from a small town in Wales to be singing about cosmopolitan Miami; a perfect parallel to the feel-ing of absurdity which can accompany a big life change. Such changes demand ad-justment, she muses, punctuated by the continuing chime of the synth and a smat-tering of sax; Never be the same again / No way / Falling skies and people are bored...Oh, it takes some time / It hangs in doors.
From there, into the early morning mist sprouts gently-wrought first single 'Daylight Matters'. Its persistent I love yous, voiced over a subtly disorderly arrangement, are not, as they may at first seem, an outpouring of affection, but rather a luxuriation in the deliciousness of self-pity; the product of time spent alone "enforcing an absence in order to mourn it" as opposed to an out and out love song -- although, Le Bon adds, "love is always lurking, I suppose." Hot on the heels of the first is melancholic second single 'Home to You', at once a new sound for Le Bon and yet still identifi-ably hers; exemplary of Reward's shift away from the more classical-sounding keys 2016's Crab Day, and a lilt towards the electronic in its predominant use of synthe-siser. But despite this stylistic departure, the ghost of the Meers lingers; that Re-ward's ten songs were conceived alone at a piano remains evident not by their lit-eral sound, but rather by the feeling of closeness that they convey.
This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential stu-dio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Though a stint in Los Angeles to try and finish some of the songs didn't last long ("it just didn't work...it was just too hectic, everything seemed a bit more frag-mented and people were coming and going, as opposed to it being this closed off to the world-ness that I think I really seek when I'm recording"), Le Bon and co-producer and engineer Samur Khouja took to the Joshua Tree desert. "We barely saw other people and it was conducive to finding our feet with the record again."
Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick -- Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxo-phone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Kling-hoffer on guitars -- and were added to the album, "one by one, one on one". The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon's previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a rel-atively drastic change in approach.
Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or criti-cally acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon's solo work -- and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) -- has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. This skilful traversing of apparent contradic-tions continues to make itself known on Reward, where, from the lamenting bones of 'Home to You' springs 'Mother's Mother's Magazines', a song derived from "be-ing around a lot of really fed up women" which in its loose twanginess of composi-tion and playful lyrics, calls to mind DRINKS -- the side-project which Le Bon co-parents with Tim Presley (of White Fence). Glimmers of the biting, tongue-in-cheek and often surrealist imagery found scattered throughout Le Bon's previous works rear their heads once more on 'Sad Nudes' (Pick up the phone / Take the call from your mother / She really wants you to answer) and the pulsating, cascading 'Mag-nificent Gestures' (I was born with no lips / Drip drip drips). Though things take a turn for the pessimistic on third single 'The Light', (Mother I feel the crowd on the turn / Took out the windows / Moved the stairs / And I don't see the comedy / Hold-ing the door to my own tragedy / Take blame for the hurt but the hurt belongs to me), it is not without an underlying sense of humour, as Le Bon cynically ponders Where would he go for fun in this town? And after all, the light that eventually seeks her out offers the lonely artist salvation.
The multifaceted nature of Le Bon's art -- its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious -- is evident right down to the album's very name. "People hear the word 'reward' and they think that it's a positive word" says Le Bon, "and to me it's quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it's really indicative of the times we're living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning." The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: "Always keep your hand behind the chisel."
-- Diva Harris, March 2019
show less
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."
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.
There is as much unsaid -- or rather obscured -- as explicitly stated: Le Bon's 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.
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, "It's my last ride...".
What we're left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, "each one a shard of the same broken mirror" -- shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, "No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it."
Though in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, applying a singular skill and instantly identifiable sound to albums by the likes of Wilco, Devendra Banhart and St. Vincent's Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with years-long collaborator Samur Khouja. "There's this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you'll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio".
To a similar end her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. "Over the years of working together Euan has uncoupled his playing from the traditional to house the emotional frequency I have asked of him. On this record especially, it's the voice that takes over when words are too concrete for the feeling." He's joined here by similarly close friends - Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion.
An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. "The characters are interchangeable" concludes Cate, "but at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself."
~~~
It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon's fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. "There's a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night," she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers -- the first piano she had ever owned -- for company, "windows closed to absolute-ly everyone", and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider's back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.
Grandfather-clock-like chimes occupy the first few bars of opener 'Miami', heralding the commencement of an album largely concerned with a period of significant per-sonal change. Not only is the city of the song's title the location of a seismic shift in Le Bon's life, but it is also, she suggests, faintly ridiculous for someone from a small town in Wales to be singing about cosmopolitan Miami; a perfect parallel to the feel-ing of absurdity which can accompany a big life change. Such changes demand ad-justment, she muses, punctuated by the continuing chime of the synth and a smat-tering of sax; Never be the same again / No way / Falling skies and people are bored...Oh, it takes some time / It hangs in doors.
From there, into the early morning mist sprouts gently-wrought first single 'Daylight Matters'. Its persistent I love yous, voiced over a subtly disorderly arrangement, are not, as they may at first seem, an outpouring of affection, but rather a luxuriation in the deliciousness of self-pity; the product of time spent alone "enforcing an absence in order to mourn it" as opposed to an out and out love song -- although, Le Bon adds, "love is always lurking, I suppose." Hot on the heels of the first is melancholic second single 'Home to You', at once a new sound for Le Bon and yet still identifi-ably hers; exemplary of Reward's shift away from the more classical-sounding keys 2016's Crab Day, and a lilt towards the electronic in its predominant use of synthe-siser. But despite this stylistic departure, the ghost of the Meers lingers; that Re-ward's ten songs were conceived alone at a piano remains evident not by their lit-eral sound, but rather by the feeling of closeness that they convey.
This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential stu-dio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Though a stint in Los Angeles to try and finish some of the songs didn't last long ("it just didn't work...it was just too hectic, everything seemed a bit more frag-mented and people were coming and going, as opposed to it being this closed off to the world-ness that I think I really seek when I'm recording"), Le Bon and co-producer and engineer Samur Khouja took to the Joshua Tree desert. "We barely saw other people and it was conducive to finding our feet with the record again."
Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick -- Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxo-phone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Kling-hoffer on guitars -- and were added to the album, "one by one, one on one". The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon's previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a rel-atively drastic change in approach.
Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or criti-cally acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon's solo work -- and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) -- has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. This skilful traversing of apparent contradic-tions continues to make itself known on Reward, where, from the lamenting bones of 'Home to You' springs 'Mother's Mother's Magazines', a song derived from "be-ing around a lot of really fed up women" which in its loose twanginess of composi-tion and playful lyrics, calls to mind DRINKS -- the side-project which Le Bon co-parents with Tim Presley (of White Fence). Glimmers of the biting, tongue-in-cheek and often surrealist imagery found scattered throughout Le Bon's previous works rear their heads once more on 'Sad Nudes' (Pick up the phone / Take the call from your mother / She really wants you to answer) and the pulsating, cascading 'Mag-nificent Gestures' (I was born with no lips / Drip drip drips). Though things take a turn for the pessimistic on third single 'The Light', (Mother I feel the crowd on the turn / Took out the windows / Moved the stairs / And I don't see the comedy / Hold-ing the door to my own tragedy / Take blame for the hurt but the hurt belongs to me), it is not without an underlying sense of humour, as Le Bon cynically ponders Where would he go for fun in this town? And after all, the light that eventually seeks her out offers the lonely artist salvation.
The multifaceted nature of Le Bon's art -- its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious -- is evident right down to the album's very name. "People hear the word 'reward' and they think that it's a positive word" says Le Bon, "and to me it's quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it's really indicative of the times we're living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning." The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: "Always keep your hand behind the chisel."
-- Diva Harris, March 2019
Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon's 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.
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."
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.
There is as much unsaid -- or rather obscured -- as explicitly stated: Le Bon's 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.
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, "It's my last ride...".
What we're left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, "each one a shard of the same broken mirror" -- shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, "No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it."
Though in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, applying a singular skill and instantly identifiable sound to albums by the likes of Wilco, Devendra Banhart and St. Vincent's Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with years-long collaborator Samur Khouja. "There's this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you'll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio".
To a similar end her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. "Over the years of working together Euan has uncoupled his playing from the traditional to house the emotional frequency I have asked of him. On this record especially, it's the voice that takes over when words are too concrete for the feeling." He's joined here by similarly close friends - Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion.
An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. "The characters are interchangeable" concludes Cate, "but at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself."
~~~
It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon's fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. "There's a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night," she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers -- the first piano she had ever owned -- for company, "windows closed to absolute-ly everyone", and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider's back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.
Grandfather-clock-like chimes occupy the first few bars of opener 'Miami', heralding the commencement of an album largely concerned with a period of significant per-sonal change. Not only is the city of the song's title the location of a seismic shift in Le Bon's life, but it is also, she suggests, faintly ridiculous for someone from a small town in Wales to be singing about cosmopolitan Miami; a perfect parallel to the feel-ing of absurdity which can accompany a big life change. Such changes demand ad-justment, she muses, punctuated by the continuing chime of the synth and a smat-tering of sax; Never be the same again / No way / Falling skies and people are bored...Oh, it takes some time / It hangs in doors.
From there, into the early morning mist sprouts gently-wrought first single 'Daylight Matters'. Its persistent I love yous, voiced over a subtly disorderly arrangement, are not, as they may at first seem, an outpouring of affection, but rather a luxuriation in the deliciousness of self-pity; the product of time spent alone "enforcing an absence in order to mourn it" as opposed to an out and out love song -- although, Le Bon adds, "love is always lurking, I suppose." Hot on the heels of the first is melancholic second single 'Home to You', at once a new sound for Le Bon and yet still identifi-ably hers; exemplary of Reward's shift away from the more classical-sounding keys 2016's Crab Day, and a lilt towards the electronic in its predominant use of synthe-siser. But despite this stylistic departure, the ghost of the Meers lingers; that Re-ward's ten songs were conceived alone at a piano remains evident not by their lit-eral sound, but rather by the feeling of closeness that they convey.
This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential stu-dio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Though a stint in Los Angeles to try and finish some of the songs didn't last long ("it just didn't work...it was just too hectic, everything seemed a bit more frag-mented and people were coming and going, as opposed to it being this closed off to the world-ness that I think I really seek when I'm recording"), Le Bon and co-producer and engineer Samur Khouja took to the Joshua Tree desert. "We barely saw other people and it was conducive to finding our feet with the record again."
Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick -- Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxo-phone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Kling-hoffer on guitars -- and were added to the album, "one by one, one on one". The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon's previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a rel-atively drastic change in approach.
Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or criti-cally acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon's solo work -- and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) -- has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. This skilful traversing of apparent contradic-tions continues to make itself known on Reward, where, from the lamenting bones of 'Home to You' springs 'Mother's Mother's Magazines', a song derived from "be-ing around a lot of really fed up women" which in its loose twanginess of composi-tion and playful lyrics, calls to mind DRINKS -- the side-project which Le Bon co-parents with Tim Presley (of White Fence). Glimmers of the biting, tongue-in-cheek and often surrealist imagery found scattered throughout Le Bon's previous works rear their heads once more on 'Sad Nudes' (Pick up the phone / Take the call from your mother / She really wants you to answer) and the pulsating, cascading 'Mag-nificent Gestures' (I was born with no lips / Drip drip drips). Though things take a turn for the pessimistic on third single 'The Light', (Mother I feel the crowd on the turn / Took out the windows / Moved the stairs / And I don't see the comedy / Hold-ing the door to my own tragedy / Take blame for the hurt but the hurt belongs to me), it is not without an underlying sense of humour, as Le Bon cynically ponders Where would he go for fun in this town? And after all, the light that eventually seeks her out offers the lonely artist salvation.
The multifaceted nature of Le Bon's art -- its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious -- is evident right down to the album's very name. "People hear the word 'reward' and they think that it's a positive word" says Le Bon, "and to me it's quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it's really indicative of the times we're living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning." The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: "Always keep your hand behind the chisel."
-- Diva Harris, March 2019
read more
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."
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.
There is as much unsaid -- or rather obscured -- as explicitly stated: Le Bon's 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.
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, "It's my last ride...".
What we're left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, "each one a shard of the same broken mirror" -- shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, "No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it."
Though in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, applying a singular skill and instantly identifiable sound to albums by the likes of Wilco, Devendra Banhart and St. Vincent's Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with years-long collaborator Samur Khouja. "There's this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you'll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio".
To a similar end her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. "Over the years of working together Euan has uncoupled his playing from the traditional to house the emotional frequency I have asked of him. On this record especially, it's the voice that takes over when words are too concrete for the feeling." He's joined here by similarly close friends - Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion.
An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. "The characters are interchangeable" concludes Cate, "but at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself."
~~~
It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon's fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. "There's a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night," she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers -- the first piano she had ever owned -- for company, "windows closed to absolute-ly everyone", and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider's back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.
Grandfather-clock-like chimes occupy the first few bars of opener 'Miami', heralding the commencement of an album largely concerned with a period of significant per-sonal change. Not only is the city of the song's title the location of a seismic shift in Le Bon's life, but it is also, she suggests, faintly ridiculous for someone from a small town in Wales to be singing about cosmopolitan Miami; a perfect parallel to the feel-ing of absurdity which can accompany a big life change. Such changes demand ad-justment, she muses, punctuated by the continuing chime of the synth and a smat-tering of sax; Never be the same again / No way / Falling skies and people are bored...Oh, it takes some time / It hangs in doors.
From there, into the early morning mist sprouts gently-wrought first single 'Daylight Matters'. Its persistent I love yous, voiced over a subtly disorderly arrangement, are not, as they may at first seem, an outpouring of affection, but rather a luxuriation in the deliciousness of self-pity; the product of time spent alone "enforcing an absence in order to mourn it" as opposed to an out and out love song -- although, Le Bon adds, "love is always lurking, I suppose." Hot on the heels of the first is melancholic second single 'Home to You', at once a new sound for Le Bon and yet still identifi-ably hers; exemplary of Reward's shift away from the more classical-sounding keys 2016's Crab Day, and a lilt towards the electronic in its predominant use of synthe-siser. But despite this stylistic departure, the ghost of the Meers lingers; that Re-ward's ten songs were conceived alone at a piano remains evident not by their lit-eral sound, but rather by the feeling of closeness that they convey.
This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential stu-dio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Though a stint in Los Angeles to try and finish some of the songs didn't last long ("it just didn't work...it was just too hectic, everything seemed a bit more frag-mented and people were coming and going, as opposed to it being this closed off to the world-ness that I think I really seek when I'm recording"), Le Bon and co-producer and engineer Samur Khouja took to the Joshua Tree desert. "We barely saw other people and it was conducive to finding our feet with the record again."
Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick -- Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxo-phone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Kling-hoffer on guitars -- and were added to the album, "one by one, one on one". The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon's previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a rel-atively drastic change in approach.
Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or criti-cally acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon's solo work -- and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) -- has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. This skilful traversing of apparent contradic-tions continues to make itself known on Reward, where, from the lamenting bones of 'Home to You' springs 'Mother's Mother's Magazines', a song derived from "be-ing around a lot of really fed up women" which in its loose twanginess of composi-tion and playful lyrics, calls to mind DRINKS -- the side-project which Le Bon co-parents with Tim Presley (of White Fence). Glimmers of the biting, tongue-in-cheek and often surrealist imagery found scattered throughout Le Bon's previous works rear their heads once more on 'Sad Nudes' (Pick up the phone / Take the call from your mother / She really wants you to answer) and the pulsating, cascading 'Mag-nificent Gestures' (I was born with no lips / Drip drip drips). Though things take a turn for the pessimistic on third single 'The Light', (Mother I feel the crowd on the turn / Took out the windows / Moved the stairs / And I don't see the comedy / Hold-ing the door to my own tragedy / Take blame for the hurt but the hurt belongs to me), it is not without an underlying sense of humour, as Le Bon cynically ponders Where would he go for fun in this town? And after all, the light that eventually seeks her out offers the lonely artist salvation.
The multifaceted nature of Le Bon's art -- its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious -- is evident right down to the album's very name. "People hear the word 'reward' and they think that it's a positive word" says Le Bon, "and to me it's quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it's really indicative of the times we're living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning." The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: "Always keep your hand behind the chisel."
-- Diva Harris, March 2019
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