Rumaan Alam writes in The New Yorker on his obsessive, repeated, chronic, listening to Cate Le Bon's shift toward a prophetic lyrical presence heard on her newest, "Michelangelo Dying", in which he sees an evocation of Laurie Anderson's acclaimed "Big Science" album of the 1980s. In "The Uneasy Prophecies of Cate Le Bon", further parallels can be found in that of the production and guitar sound of Robin Guthrie and Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, the soaring vocal incantations of Björk and Kate Bush, and the liquid, flowing, non-euclidean pop structures and production of Brian Eno. The pedigree, and it's parallels with formative artists of the 1970s and 80s is made explicit in "Ride", the album's penultimate track, a duet with Welsh art-pop songwriter and violist John Cale, who had his beginnings in none other than The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Velvet Underground. Coming from a Welsh tradition of the surreal, the singer-songwriter is forever trying to capture that which cannot be said, and in channeling the art-pop lineage of these inspirations and peers, "Cate Le Bon Evokes Pop Outliers", in her "Choosing of Absurdity". The newest work is striking in its shift away from such sensibilities. Speaking with NPR, Le Bon relates that after a long relationship ended painfully, she swapped the desert of Joshua Tree for south Wales, and set to work on her most emotionally direct record yet, "‘The Breakup was Like an Amputation that Saves You’: Cate Le Bon on Healing From Heartache and Her Heavy New Album". In conversation with Vogue a month before her North American tour with a night at Seattle's Neptune Theatre, “I had this image of something industrial and angular,” Le Bon shared from her home in Cardiff, Wales. “I was sidestepping, trying to outrun sitting with heartache. But I kept veering back towards what "Michelangelo Dying" became". An album which has its origins in wanting to craft a work which fit into the hard edged electro-industrial sounds on the 1990s, has instead manifest as a plaintive, soaring, paean to the end of love, "With Her New Album, Michelangelo Dying, Cate Le Bon Takes on Heartache".
