For the past 15 years, Cate Le Bon has been constructing her own warped world of sound. In Le Bon Land, guitars bend and liquify like Dali clocks, synthesizers echo into an infinite horizon, and familiar words stretch and contract within her steely register. Across her previous six albums, Le Bon’s music has expanded from winsome freak folk to lush and towering art pop that lays bare her love of Bowie and John Cale. Le Bon’s imaginative approach to contemporary rock music and the outré edges of pop has made her a sought-after producer (by St. Vincent, Wilco, Dry Cleaning) and ranked her among the most singular and instantly recognizable artists working today.
On previous records, Le Bon delighted in abstraction, writing askew verses about isolation and the relationship between art and artist. But on her seventh album, Michelangelo Dying, Le Bon plunges headfirst into craggier depths: pervasive heartache. After spending nearly a decade in Joshua Tree, California, Le Bon endured the messy collapse of a long-term relationship, and relocated to her native Cardiff, Wales, where lifelong friends and family live nearby. In the wake of her breakup, Le Bon was shoving away any instinct to write about it—in fact, she had an entirely different album in the works. But it was too potent an experience to ignore, and her body revolted until she acknowledged it; back pain and full-body hives persisted as she traveled non-stop to produce for other artists. “The breakup was always like an amputation that you don’t really want, but you know will save you,” Le Bon told The Guardian’s Laura Snapes earlier this year. Letting herself sing about it was just as critical; “there’s a softness that comes from the surrender,” she added.
Heartbreak is perhaps the most trodden artistic topic of all-time, but Le Bon’s portrayal glimmers in its own mythic light. On the softly pulsing “Love Unrehearsed,” Le Bon muses about a woman fit “for a marble face.” “Does she sleep like a stone/’Cause you touch her more?” Le Bon inquires, her serene timbre making the question sound all the more accusatory. The song, which contains the album’s title phrase, doesn’t build to a crescendo but undulates like a steady tide. That circular pattern, never breaking, seems to be the point: “Stay forever/But you are so cruel/I get swept away/In your love,” Le Bon murmurs.
Michelangelo Dying is teeming with instrumental loops like this: Le Bon’s boinging bassline on “I Know What’s Nice,” Valentina Magaletti’s roomy percussion on “Pieces of My Heart,” Paul Jones’ staccato piano on “Body As a River.” These elements ground Le Bon’s songs, and keep you sheltered in the eye as gusts of saxophone and electric guitar storm around you. Le Bon seems to extract power from repetition, as if she’s reciting a mantra—or conducting an exorcism. “Ride,” Le Bon’s duet with longtime hero John Cale, is a shade darker than most of the album, the sludgiest entry on Michelangelo Dying. Its titular refrain is weighty, as are the watery synths spilling out and nudging the song forward—as if she wants us to feel time passing, life passing. Every second, if possible.
Le Bon fills her music with ornately carved oddities, but she’s always had an ear for pop melodies, even within her most ambitiously arranged songs. On “Mother of Riches,” Le Bon teases words out into billowing vocal hooks, as muted piano thumps underneath. “I can’t remember/What makes us elegant when love goes spare,” she sings, drawing the last word out until it ripples like dress hems animated by a breeze. It is one of the album’s best tracks—enlivened by layers of tapped percussion and Le Bon’s electric guitar, which buzzes like a neon sign on the Vegas Strip.
Le Bon’s songwriting mastery—her ability to conjure mystery and hyper-specific characters simultaneously—is most evident on lead single “Heaven Is No Feeling,” on which she contorts her voice between foreboding lows and a seraphic falsetto. The former introduces the track with a husky “What does she want?”; later, the phrase repeats, a companion to “hello? ”—both questions boomeranging back like a repeat crank call. As Cate Le Bon breakup songs go, this one is especially vivid and incisive; she recalls a sprawled-out man who occupies space “like a ribbon untied,” an image that is precise and gestural at the same time. We see his untidiness, but also his beauty. Le Bon’s longtime collaborator Euan Hinshelwood eeks in with keening saxophone, which unfurls around the edges and imbues it with a dose of melancholy. As the song fades, Le Bon repeats “hello?” until her voice disintegrates with the music. It is a greeting unmet, a question unanswered. Le Bon is left communing with herself—a choice, not a punishment.
