Album of the Week: Cate Le Bon – Michelangelo Dying
Staff Review
Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon’s new album Michelangelo Dying has, in most press reports, been described as a break-up record. That label might conjure images of sparse, piano-led laments or acoustic ballads. Refreshingly, Le Bon eschews cliché in favour of something far more intriguing and rewarding. While the songs do carry a sense of cathartic release, Le Bon frequently prefers an inversion, and each one is a meticulously crafted work of art-rock.
Over the past decade, Le Bon has carved out a space so distinctive that her instrumental palette and songwriting approach are instantly recognisable. Though rooted in rock and folk foundations, her music has, over time, become increasingly refracted through an experimental ‘80s filter of post-punk, new wave and synth-pop. A palette where fluttering keyboards, slinky bass motifs, and deliciously off-kilter melodies are awash in a languorous, psychedelic haze. Love Unrehearsed exemplifies this, with its lilting gait and sinewy guitar solo, evoking the dreamlike drift of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Elsewhere, the influence of Talk Talk’s melancholic synth-pop and the idiosyncratic early solo work of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s members, particularly Yukihiro Takahashi, feels keenly present.
An early highlight, Mothers of Riches moves with bubbling energy, carried by tight rhythms, scything guitars, and serpentine saxophone. The heartbreaking Pieces of My Heart confronts the album’s central theme most directly: “this is how we fall apart / I’m on the ropes” and “pieces of my heart erased / and nothing’s gonna change.” Yet instead of leaning into anguish, the song floats on liquid backing textures that give it an otherworldly quality, as if caught in the surreal moment of refusing to believe reality.
That same effect runs through Michelangelo Dying’s finest moments. From the swooning shimmer of About Time, to the gentle lift and warped groove of Heaven Is No Feeling, the strident push and pull of the krautrock-esque Body as a River to the mysterious Ride On, featuring fellow Welsh icon John Cale, which transports us to the darker corners of the human psyche. Each track contributes to the album’s unique depiction of unsettled, feverish stupor.
Though it wrestles with grief and its aftermath, Michelangelo Dying is ultimately an inviting and immersive record, easily one of the most resonant and accomplished works in Cate Le Bon’s remarkable catalogue.
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’sPompeii) 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.”
