Since I heard Mug Museum back in 2013, the Welsh surrealist pop/ indie artist, Cate Le Bon, is one of the artists I have always followed. She’s had projects that were too weird for me, like her DRINKS collab with White Fence’s Tim Presley, and dropped one of, in my opinion, the best baroque pop albums of the last 30 years, with 2022’s Pompeii—an album I still throw on to this day whenever I need to feel inspired.
Her approach to songwriting has always been singular, with guitar riffs you’ve never come close to hearing before, and synth production work that always keeps you guessing. I suppose that’s why I usually love Le Bon’s work; I never quite know where a song is going to go. Case in point, the hazy saxophone solo at the end of “Love Unrehearsed,” on this new album, Michelangelo Dying. For me, Pompeii is pretty impossible to top, but Le Bon has come very close with Michelangelo Dying. A song like “Mother of Riches” brings back the saxophone and Le Bon’s catchy yet oddball vocals, under a jumpy, almost medieval harpsichord synth, then descending into an almost bossa nova drum beat? It shouldn’t work, but it does.
The album takes more of a straightforward synth pop turn with “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?,” which sounds like a breakup song; a memory about your past partner’s birthday and their mother. What a great way to take something so relatable and push it into baroque pop bliss—and the saxophone comes back for a spirited outro. “Heaven Is No Feeling,” has those underwatery guitar stabs Le Bon loves, as the sax and synth lay a bed of atmospheric instrumentation. Le Bon’s falsettos here are also quite angelic. Last song I’ll mention is “Ride (feat. John Cale),” a reverb-drenched organ ballad featuring the vocal marriage between Le Bon and the avant-garde master. I love how we hear Cale singing it pretty straight and then have a few mixed-in moments of his crazier vibrato, which feel a bit muted. It’s very Cate Le Bon; taking the little moments and letting them shine for few seconds before diving head first into abstraction.
