Michelangelo Dying [VINYL]

Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon’s seventh record MichelangeloDying usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album aboutlove, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfullyiridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up — but which in doingso, picks at it too. Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound — a machine with aheart — that has taken shape over her last two records (2019’s Reward and 2022’sPompeii) as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producingherself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion andvoices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, withflashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and LaurieAnderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout. What we’re left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of songcycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, “each one a shard of thesame broken mirror” — shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending onhow it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, “No revelations. Noconclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowedmyself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching fora revelation or order to any of it.” An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener andartist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to beexquisitely, profoundly alone. “The characters are interchangeable” concludesCate, “but at the end of it all, it’s me meeting myself.” A1. JeromeA2. Love UnrehearsedA3. Mothers of RichesA4. Is It Worth It (HappyBirthday)?A5. Pieces of My HeartB1. About TimeB2. Heaven Is No FeelingB3. Body As A RiverB4. Ride (featuring John Cale)B5. I Know What's NiceMEX353