Just six days before his death, Michelangelo was still hard at work, hacking away at The Rondanini Pietá. Operating with the belief that the sculpture’s form already existed within the marble, his stone carvings revealed to him a rough image of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of a crucified Jesus. Unlike his earlier work, the mother and son’s figures are more undefined. Some simply chalk this up to a result of the sculpture still being “in progress,” while others consider the shapelessness to be purposeful. Slumped across one another, the mother and son’s bodies are so converged that they produce an amorphous, almost inhuman formation. Is that Mary’s amputated leg? Is that Jesus’ arm? Which parts of yourself belong to you when you love someone? The sculpture wonders, perhaps terrifyingly: What happens to love when it dies? Where does that faith go? On Michelangelo Dying, Cate Le Bon looks for the answers.
In the same manner of the titular artist, Le Bon unexpectedly—or perhaps divinely—pulled a record out of the rubble of her split from her longtime partner. Much like love itself, a breakup often feels like both the start and end of the world as you know it, popping the bubble of a starry-eyed fantasy. Eventually, from the punctured outpour’s erosion comes a new formation of a new world. Michelangelo Dying is this process manifested. On every track, murky synthesizers and sweeping saxophones landscape Le Bon’s minimal, nascent, neo-psychedelic universe. Constructed yet again by her go-to team of co-producer Samur Khouja and saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood, the album’s modernist architecture is unsurprisingly reminiscent of her most recent albums, Reward and Pompeii. Where they diverge is within Le Bon’s vocal clarity. Grieving a post-COVID world, Pompeii’s chamber pop turned isolation into something solemn and terrifying; as she sang on “Moderation,” ”I quit the earth / I’m out of my mind.” On Pompeii she was awash in her own noise, but on Michaelangelo Dying she’s rising above it—her voice more front and center than ever before. Here, the surreal reveals instead of obscures; and at the center of it all is Le Bon. Ironically, isolation is her now saving grace.
Yet it’s still a long road before Le Bon gets close to finding this singularity. Like the bodies infused on the Pietrà, Le Bon is so entangled with her lover—“Do you see yourself as me and me as you? Mixed invention”—on Michelangelo Dying that she’s apprehensive to ever fully sever her connection, be it out of fear of amputation or freedom. Although she knows the removal will ultimately become necessary—she even instructs herself how to do it on “Pieces of My Heart,” singing, “This is how you break a leg / You let the shadow lead the shape”— it seems futile to try, as if her own life is out of her control.
To rectify this, Le Bon steps back to view all the different angles and interpretations of her love’s creation. Naturally, she does this in a backwards kind of way, by becoming the fantasy and the art herself. “She’s a real contender / For a marble face,” she sings, imagining herself as a sculpture on “Love Unrehearsed.” Distant drums pulse and soggy guitars circle as Le Bon is “off the hook / on the plate,” made to be spun around and shaped without protest. Although she knows she’s forgoing her own autonomy, it’s “all [she] knows / how to let [herself] fold.” Soft Cell electronics bounce around the thrush of a xanned-out saxophone on “Mother of Riches.” Three years ago, Le Bon said the “grief is in the saxophone” and it’s the same across Michaelangelo Dying, as her alarmist, sobering woodwind bleats in misery until strength awakens in the reality of submissive love.
Le Bon is self-aware of it all. She knows the role she’s playing in her acquiescence; in this sense, the tracks on Michelangelo Dying are not so much revelations as they are pieces of evidence collected to justify a decision to uncouple—a decision, by this point, that she’s already half-made. It’s sort of like the feeling you get when re-reading journal entries after a tense period in life: you see an obvious problem festering, albeit subtly at first, then spreading like a virus across every page until, finally, every thought is contaminated (or completely unreadable). When you look back at the pattern, it’s not surprising. It’s a confirmation: Yes, of course, it was always this. It’s like what Le Bon says on the propulsive “Body As A River”: “I read what I write / And it’s never without shame / In the pages lost / I’m holding on to sorrow and lust.”
It might sound heavy, but there’s a cheeky quality to Le Bon’s abstractions that transform her untraditional lyrics into something more accessible. After all, what is truly more relatable or humbling than a break-up? It’s a lyrical signature that lands somewhere within the realms of Nico’s crypticism, Kevin Ayers’ morbid playfulness, and, faintly, the overall absurdism of Yoko Ono, minus the yodeling. But on Michelangelo Dying, Le Bon’s words are more tangible than ever. Rather than masquerading idioms her words become direct—or at least land somewhere on that spectrum—due to needing to understand her own predicament; there is no need for frills, only truth. But she still isn’t without quirk. Whether promoting masochism, “eating rocks,” or questioning if romantic complacency is an act of allegiance or negligence, her stone-faced aphorisms are almost always softened by a knowing wink—an assurance to herself, and to you, that this will all soon become the past.
On the other hand, it’s tough to expound on Michelangelo Dying’s instrumentation, as all of the tracks are dunked in the same reverberated sound pool. Surprisingly, this sameness is not monotonous, but so fluid that it becomes sublime. Le Bon’s technical maturity is no doubt due to experience and age, especially if you’re comparing this record to her Crab Day’s post-punk or Mug Museum’s boutiquey, lo-fi twee, yet I’d wager this precision is largely due to the production talents Le Bon has recently lent to many good names: Horsegirl, Devandra Bernhardt, Wilco, St. Vincent. She’s clearly a musician’s musician, and everyone wants a piece of her style, including the Velvet Underground’s very own John Cale, whose backup vocals join her on the mechanical, slow-grooving “Ride.” As the only outside voice heard on the album, Cale delivers some affirming solace.
Isolation, both good and bad, is clearly one of Cate Le Bon’s most gnawing artistic fixations—it’s essentially her sparing partner by now. On Reward, she recounted the happenings of a year-long reclusion brought upon by an (unclear) life-altering event, and on Pompeii she devastatingly observed the entire world crumbling during lockdown. On Michelangelo Dying there is no concrete narrative conclusion other than solitude invoked by a love lost. But there is progress, once solitude is no longer a grave consequence. Mirroring the posture of the The Rondanini Pietà, you can even see this progress on the album cover, as Le Bon stands erect in front of a mirror, her body soaking wet and draped in a clay-patterned caftan. Still unable to completely face herself and her own reality, she’s turned forward, with her arm twisted behind her against the glass. Her body seems “posed in the pain,” but it’s also stanced in protection.
