Even those dumb tchotkes we own can take on a greater meaning simply by virtue of how long we’ve owned them. Sometimes it’s a small wooden cabinet filled with thimbles or spoons, or little magnets of all 50 states permanently fused onto the fridge door, or a binder full of basketball cards I can’t let go of just yet. For Cate Le Bon, it may be something as simple as collection of coffee mugs that as time wears on becomes a museum on a shelf, endowed with tiny memories of the past. The Welshwoman sings on *Mug Museum'*s title track, “I forget the detail/ but remember the warmth.”
Le Bon’s understated and modest third album is in part a lament to the erosion of memories, all told with remarkable detail. These are small, graceful songs with deceptive amounts of depth, due in no small part to the circumstances surrounding writing the album. While in Wales last winter just as Le Bon was ready to move on from her 2012 album CYRK, her maternal grandmother died. The songs on Mug Museum were written during that time of reacclimation after grief, as Le Bon struggled with her loss and how affected her maternal role in her family.
Le Bon navigates these uncertainties with both poise and a kind of performed confidence, like someone just pushed her out on to the stage from the wings. Inspiration notwithstanding, it’s the most spritely album she’s released, though the songs themselves remain room-sized and unadorned. The band behind her, featuring guitarist H. Hawkline and White Fence drummer Nick Murray, hit at some familiar folk garage signposts from her previous albums. Mostly, they're a tight, scrappy Euro beat band from the 60s held together by a dusty organ underneath, but sometimes they adopt more metro Television sound, or a carefree California psych group.
The main focus though is Le Bon, whose voice grows more and more singular and versatile with each release. The Nico comparisons still linger on perhaps only because the two are just biologically similar in their yawn-to-song delivery. But where Nico’s voice was alluring in a kind of siren way, Le Bon’s is more curious and diverse. Sometimes she sounds like the shyest member of a folksy sylvan choir and other times she rears up and belts out a high soprano note at the climax of “Duke”. These precise melodies are often performed without precision, or at least without consonants—something about her thick Welsh accent and tipsy elocution just makes her voice swirl around words rather than really land on them. When she sings, “split me like timber,” or, “beat me like egg yolks,” on “I Can’t Help You”, it’s less the emotion behind the sentiment and more the joy in hearing the words spill out.
And Le Bon revels in her language. For Le Bon, who is one of a small percentage of people in this world who can speak Welsh and frequently sings in it, her love for words rarely feels ostentatious, and her gentle delivery rarely makes her words intrusive. There’s several simple turns of phrases on Mug Museum that are just captivating: the subtle transpositions in the chorus of “I Think I Knew”, sung in a classic duet format with the well-paired Perfume Genius. There’s the tangled and desperate "Mirror Me" where she sings, "Mirror me/ Like you want me to be/ Like I want you to see me" (a knowing inversion of Nico, perhaps?). And there’s the emotional climax, “Sisters”, where Le Bon, now powerful in her lower register, proclaims, “I won’t die/ I’m a sister”, coated with denial and stuffed with subtext. We finally get a good look at her fear of mortality and sororal dread, and even then, it’s all boiling under her cool and collected voice.
The pen gets away from Le Bon a few times on the record, most notably on “Wild” where the band and Le Bon play with aggresive dissonance and purple prose, respectively. They don’t work especially well trying to fill spaces, they work better at sounding isolated in them. That’s what Le Bon does best: delicately amplify the tiniest moments that would otherwise go unnoticed. From H. Hawkline's erratic, trashy guitar on late-album psych highlight “Cuckoo Through the Walls”, to the creaking of the piano stool on the final track, Mug Museum accumulates hundreds of pieces of Le Bon's life to form an imperfect whole. By the end as Le Bon sings alone above a rusty piano, it sounds like she’s surveying the artifacts around her, her questions and worries laid out in great detail in the nine tracks that came before it. Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it—she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.
