{"id":157770,"date":"2025-09-24T15:56:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T15:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/157770\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T15:56:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T15:56:07","slug":"cate-le-bon-michaelangelo-dying-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/157770\/","title":{"rendered":"Cate Le Bon ‘Michaelangelo Dying’ Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSince she began making records in the early 2010s, Welsh-born, California-based Cate Le Bon<\/a> has staked out her own unique avant-pop space, especially on excellent recent albums like 2019\u2019s Reward and 2022\u2019s Pompeii. Her warmly stentorian singing and dreamy lyrics can have a de-centering effect, so her music often gets called \u201csurreal\u201d or \u201cdada\u201d \u2014 one critic described it as \u201canti-mimetic.\u201d\u00a0But Le Bon\u2019s records aren\u2019t good because they\u2019re strange, they\u2019re good because they\u2019re good, melodically rich and well-crafted, full of musical invention and personal\u00a0urgency. It\u2019s exactly what you might expect from an artist who once named Big Star<\/a>\u2019s sad-hearted classic Third and Pavement<\/a>\u2019s most emotionally up-front LP, Brighten the Corners, alongside hip touchstones like Faust, Bill Fay, and Serge Gainsbourg in a list of her favorite albums. Along the way, she\u2019s also become a go-to producer and studio collaborator for artists from Wilco<\/a> to St. Vincent<\/a>, further deepening her stamp on the last few years of indie music. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHer latest is the most beguiling LP she\u2019s made, and arguably her most deeply felt. Singing amid filtered guitar, echoing saxophone, and circular drumming, she makes minimal yet richly textured music that can evoke David Bowie\u2019s Berlin era, the Cocteau Twins, or John Cale<\/a>, a lodestar influence on Le Bon who lends his vocals to the glacially lovely \u201cRide.\u201d (\u201cIt\u2019s my last ride,\u201d the octogenarian Velvet Underground co-founder notes candidly.)<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThe music flows with a nice distracted elegance. \u201cMothers of Riches\u201d has a forlorn danceability, while \u201cBody as a River\u201d makes a keyboard drone feel almost hymnlike.\u00a0Impressionistic lyrics would fit this stuff, but Le Bon pokes the spacious haze with direct evocations of love and heartbreak. \u201cGently read my name\/Cry and find me here\/I\u2019m eating rocks,\u201d she sings on the album-opening \u201cJerome,\u201d her voice quavering as she adds \u201cthere\u2019s nothing you can hope for.\u201d The angst-ridden yet sublimely pretty \u201cLove Unrehearsed\u201d finds Le Bon torn between harsh jealousy and faint hope: \u201cCan you set her on fire\/And come down the well with me, babe,\u201d she offers. \u201cAbout Time\u201d opens with watery guitar that brings to mind late-Eighties Wire<\/a> and turns into an almost breezy tune spiked with hurt when she sings, \u201cI\u2019m not lying in a bed you made.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIntense as that might be, vulnerable ambiguity is a key component here, too. The beautiful highlight \u201cIs It Worth It (Happy Birthday)\u201d turns on the phrase \u201cI thought about your mother\/I hope she knew I loved her,\u201d while \u201cPieces of My Heart\u201d widens the lens, as it seems to sum up an immigrant\u2019s moral dilemma when she sings, \u201cI pledged my love to America\/Then I run so far.\u201d Talk about a lyric for our time. It\u2019s just one of many moments where this alluringly opaque record becomes yearningly universal.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since she began making records in the early 2010s, Welsh-born, California-based Cate Le Bon has staked out her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[72010,72011,96,72012,128,72013,56,54,55,49432],"class_list":{"0":"post-157770","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-big-star","9":"tag-cate-le-bon","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-john-cale","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-pavement","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom","17":"tag-wire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}