Cate Le Bon - Pompeii - VINYL LP

Schmidt-Kowalski / Dascal / Riem / Takahashi - Works for Orchestra [COMPACT DISCS] Jewel Case Packaging date 05/10/2011

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. Cate Le Bon's captivating 2009 debut album available on vinyl for the first time ever. Me Oh My is the debut full-length album by the Welsh musician and songwriter. The album was originally going to be named Pet Deaths, referring to Le Bon's experiences with the subject. One song written in Welsh was originally going to be on the album, but was discarded because it interrupted the flow, though Welsh can still be heard on some tracks. InchPart folk minstrel and part psychedelic goddessInch - 4 stars - The Mirror; InchA singular talentInch 4 stars - Mojo; InchQuirky and confidentInch - Debut of the month - Uncut; InchCate Le Bon is very much her own thing.Inch 8/10 - NME; InchSongs at once as old as the hills and utterly original.Inch - Sunday Times.