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.
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.
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 fora revelation or order to any of it.”
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.”
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.
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 fora revelation or order to any of it.”
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.”
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Le Bon's 'Michelangelo Dying' takes all of the bright, angular melodicism we've come to know from albums like Reward or Crab Day, and hides it beneath a shroud of swirling chorus and deep reverb. Like listening to perfect indie-pop under the surface of the sea. Lovely.TRACK LISTING
1. Jerome
2. Love Unrehearsed
3. Mothers Of Riches
4. Is It Worth It (HappyBirthday)?
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
