CATE LE BON - Michelangelo Dying

The seventh album by the Welsh singer-songwriter and producer turns repetition into a methodological tool for transforming sensory experience into music. This is hardly new territory for Cate Le Bon's compositional approach – just think of the reiterated jagged riffs of her early work, or the gorgeous modernist lullaby "Home to You" – but on "Michelangelo Dying" it underpins the record's entire macrostructure. Spiralling repetition maps out a hypnotic soundscape, reworking the evocative exploration of "Pompeii" into a new, magmatic expanse, wrapped in further gaseous exhalations.

The slow, progressive variations fracture a long meditation like beams of refracted light, opening it up to unexpected turns, to discovery within a distorted reflection, in a process of potentially infinite multiplication. On this point, writing for The Line of Best Fit, Alan Pedder spoke of a "sonic layering with spectral, pearlescent effects". And indeed, it's precisely this peculiar iridescence that symbolises a new personal reflection on the impermanence of life – romantic life, in this particular instance.

Centred on the experience of a difficult breakup, Le Bon's music now takes on a material body. Yet deciphering the pain and the unconscious reactions that surface along the path to acceptance and healing is a journey of discovery that, through an initially descriptive process, plunges into a far vaster, more abstract horizon – one that requires the listener's own collaboration. The decoding of meaning thus blossoms through dialogue with that spoken voice which emerges from the sonic cosmos, a voice impossible to escape, especially if the listening experience is stretched out into a loop. The stronger this contact grows, the deeper one penetrates into a place that is not the subconscious, but an inlet in which glimpses of truth are preserved, presented like oracular pronouncements. There are no clear, unambiguous explanations for what brings a sincere love to an end, but the immanent sensations of the two bodies flow into a continuum that offers comfort and the care they need in order to be reborn, healed from a wound of which only the scar now remains.

My body as a river

A river running dry

And I’m sick all the time

Until he comes to life

Do you see her

Falling on the wishing bone

Dripping like a candle?

In the pages lost

I’m holding on to sorrow and lust

Leave me now 

It's precisely from this fluidity that the profound rebirth sung about in “Body As A River” takes flight, one of the most moving tracks Le Bon has ever written. Resting on a synthetic bed, wrapped in crystalline guitars and hazy saxophone lines, the melodies are delivered with a delicacy that's genuinely touching. With “About Time” and “Heaven Is No Feeling” too, the Welsh musician proves she has perfected an art-pop that pulses to its own singular, unrepeatable rhythm — a rhythm with which to celebrate the gushing forth of a new source of life along the banks of a river that seemed to have run dry. And while everything in the cosmos keeps repeating itself, Cate Le Bon shapes with “Michelangelo Dying” a variation capable of reaching into the guts of desire and harnessing its unprecedented, regenerative, emancipatory power.

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13/11/2025