REVIEW: CATE LE BON DELIVERS OBLIQUE EXPLORATION OF HEARTBREAK IN NEW ALBUM “MICHELANGELO DYING”
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY KYLEE WIENS ☆
FOR LONGTIME CATE LE BON LISTENERS—it’s no surprise that everything the Welsh experimental artist touches turns to gold. Six albums across 15 years and a handful of esteemed collaborations is an impressive feat on its own, but Le Bon’s newest album is truly a testament to her musical and production prowess; she cracks creative boundaries and personal vulnerabilities wide open with both agency and surrender.
Fractal, geometric and often elusive, her sound has been bent, molded and reshaped time and time again through her experiences. On Michelangelo Dying, however, Le Bon bravely tackles one of the most devastatingly human experiences there is. After the dissolution of a long-term relationship, she has invited listeners into the messy, brave, and beautiful musings of a heart weathered by pain. The result is a stunning collection of diary-like tracks, singular in their musical prestige and universally relatable in speaking truth to a broken heart.
The album unfurls, swells, stretches and dissipates with each aching arrangement. Texturally rich and sonically all-encompassing, listeners have no choice but to step into the world of swirling synthesizers, gooey guitar lines and buoyant bass fills. Repetition is a central tenet of the album, perhaps mimicking the logic of a racing and uncertain mind. On “Love Unrehearsed,” for example, Le Bon begs the question “Does she sleep like a stone/because you touch her more?” The lyrics meditate on a statueseque, picture perfect woman that contrasts her own internal turmoil. Often described as ethereal or abstract in her lyricism, she frankly lays out the refrain “I’m off the hook/and on the plate.” What the track lacks in a solidified chorus is made up for with an atmospheric and otherworldly composition of keys and electric guitar.
“Mothers of Riches” is more of an art-pop affair, offering melodious hooks coupled with subversive drum pulsations. The lyrics “Mothers of riches/I get excited when he meets my touch/I give up the empire/I brace the actors for his slow parade” conjure both the thrill and devastation of wanting what one cannot have. Her songwriting genius continues on track “Heaven Is No Feeling”, in which she carefully outlines the cool cruelty of a past love’s treatment of her heart. A foreboding question, “What does she want?”, introduces the track’s devastating lyrical storytelling. The verse “I see you watch me work for your slow hand/Draping my body with no rhythm just desire/The day, the night, it all ends/And you smoke our love/Like you've never known violence” is delivered against the backdrop of winding saxophones and fluttering drum patterns. Le Bon twists her vocals from ominous lows to stunning highs, winding smoothly like a river around a bend.
“Ride” marks an emotional apex in the album’s ten tracks, and displays a collaboration with one of Le Bon’s lifelong heroes, John Cale. Impressionistic and ambiguous, the track oscillates between drawn out syllabic tension and Le Bon’s breathtaking falsettos. Life and time slow to a nearly screeching halt, as the track evokes a dizzying nausea that is all too familiar in crushing heartbreak. Cale’s gravelly timbre sharpens the knife’s edge right before piercing listeners through the heart with the refrain “When liquid love escapes/He backs off or drowns a little/It's alright, it's alright”.
“I Know What’s Nice” offers a strained form of catharsis—a vision of letting go without a complete sense of closure. Such is often the case in breakups, as the decision to move on must come without a perfect sense of assuredness or ease. In fact, the track feels less like optimism and more like a surrender to the darkness and lust of a love lost. This honesty is striking and refreshing. Le Bon doesn’t make any grand gestures of things working out in the end or seamlessly untangling from her past. Rather, she admits “And everyone's here/To tell me how to dig the roses/I'm on the wrong side of paradise/But I know what's nice”. Le Bon isn’t so naive to claim she is unbroken, but makes a quiet promise to trust in her own desire.
While there is no shortage of breakup albums to exist in the ether, few hold a candle to the candor, precision and poetry of Michelangelo Dying. Le Bon draws a warm bath of sound and color, vivid in its exploration of pain and celestial in its delivery of oblique sounds. In her seventh album, Cate Le Bon has once again proved that her musical gifts are boundless, and listeners can revel once more in her masterful sonic visions.
