All Ages
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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.
Stalking its maker between Hydra, Cardiff, London and Los Angeles, Michelangelo Dying was, significantly, finished in the Californian desert, the place where much of the record’s landscape and heartache exists in her mind. The scenery’s desolation blows through the statement album opener ‘Jerome’ — all wide open space, elongated enunciations, and the gnomic instruction to “gently read my name / cry and find me here / I’m eating rocks.”
A record centered on the many states of existence within love and its aftermath, Le Bon found herself surrendering to the abstraction of intense feeling and the grieving of a fantasy. On ‘Mothers of Riches’, a letter delivers “something wrong” before love and existence “fold into nothing”, while ‘About Time’,with its looping drones and percussive synths, starkly announces “I’m not lying in a bed you made”. And perhaps most evocatively of all, the album’s centerpiece — ‘Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?’ – powerfully evokes the simultaneous universality and unknowability of love, and by extension, mortality. Her admission “I thought about your mother /I hope she knew I loved her” catches devastatingly in the chest.
There is as much unsaid — or rather obscured — as explicitly stated: Le Bon’s rich, deeply textural arrangements built up in layers when she didn’t have the words, and didn’t want to find them. 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’s Pompeii) 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.
And then there’s John Cale. His mindset of constantly moving forward and confronting life’s experiences through art while maintaining a fierce desire to keep his curiosity alive, even so deep into a career, is a vivid inspiration to Le Bon. He makes a poignant appearance here on the mournful ‘Ride’, where he simply sings, unprompted, “It’s my last ride…”.
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 for a revelation or order to any of it.”
Though in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, applying a singular skill and instantly identifiable sound to albums by the likes of Wilco, Devendra Banhart and St. Vincent’s Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with years-long collaborator Samur Khouja. “There’s this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you’ll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio”.
To a similar end her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. “Over the years of working together Euan has uncoupled his playing from the traditional to house the emotional frequency I have asked of him. On this record especially, it’s the voice that takes over when words are too concrete for the feeling.” He’s joined here by similarly close friends - Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion. 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.”
