Cate Le Bon - Me Oh My - VINYL LP

The Black Tambourines make music grounded in the ethos of D.I.Y production and scuzzy, distorted garage-rock, but with ragged grooves and a sun-kissed haze. Their music has been described as Inchsurf-punk that buzzes with urgencyInch - NME, Inchblissfully hazy garage-punkInch- Clash and Inchscuzzy rip-roaring indie-rockInch - BEAT. Over the last year The Black Tambourines have performed at Glastonbury, Isle of Wight, toured Europe and supported The Jesus and Mary Chain (among many other shows).

It's 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 (2019s Reward and 2022s 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. What were 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. 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.

Vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. Includes . 2022 . Pompeii, Cate Le Bon's sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019's Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any 'dissection of immediacy,' says Le Bon. Sonically minimal in parts, it's lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an 'uninterrupted vacuum,' Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the 'religious' sensibility in one of Tim Presley's paintings, which hung on the studio wall in Cardiff, Wales as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii's cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly how to make 'music that sounds like a painting?' Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii's signature synths made on favorites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa's 'jazz-thinking' percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja's encouraging presence.