Cate Timothy<\/a>, has released a half-dozen solo albums in the past sixteen years, in addition to two with her onetime partner Tim Presley, under the moniker DRINKS. Her music has been a constant in my life since I first stumbled upon it, a few years ago. \u201cAre You with Me Now?\u201d is representative of Le Bon\u2019s early work: the strummed guitar, the strained soprano, the candid sentiment that\u2019s maybe about love or possibly about death.<\/p>\nI\u2019m fond of the artist\u2019s folksy juvenilia, but it was her 2019 record, \u201cReward,\u201d that truly won me over. That work marked a decisive shift in musicianship and tone\u2014Le Bon began deploying a deeper, almost spoken register as a singer, while allowing her instrumentation to rely more heavily on eerie, synthesized sounds. Her next album, \u201cPompeii,\u201d from 2022, saw this experiment continue: the vocals are kind of languid, less likely to strain high than to slide down the scale, only to have the singer hold a note for a few uneasy seconds.<\/p>\n
This summer, I found myself obsessively listening to her seventh solo album, \u201cMichelangelo Dying.\u201d It kept me company on vacation, as I strolled by the ocean in the mornings, and at home, as I washed up dishes after dinner. On a long trip to visit my son\u2019s sleepaway camp, I let the record play on repeat because I\u2019m afraid to fiddle with my phone while driving. \u201cMichelangelo,\u201d with its unsettling and mournful atmosphere, captured something about this strange year. I relished its mood of anxiety and melancholy as though I were once again a teen mainlining the Smiths on my Sony Discman. Let\u2019s put it this way: if anyone ever wants to make a television show that distills the tumultuous political, social, and environmental crises of 2025, this record would be an apt soundtrack.<\/p>\n
As recently as a couple of years ago, Le Bon called Joshua Tree her home. She crafted this new work in Los Angeles, Cardiff, London, and Hydra. Maybe that peripatetic process accounts for the feeling that the record is talking about the whole world as much as it is about the artist\u2019s life. \u201cMichelangelo\u201d offers a striking contrast to its predecessors: in less than two decades, we\u2019ve witnessed an open-mike songstress morph into Laurie Anderson.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the album that \u201cMichelangelo Dying\u201d reminds me of most is Anderson\u2019s seminal \u201cBig Science,\u201d from 1982. There\u2019s an analogous cool-verging-on-blas\u00e9 lyrical delivery set off by animalesque saxophones. Both albums feature gnomic lyrical pronouncements. (\u201cRigid, collapse,\u201d Le Bon chants on the track \u201cAbout Time,\u201d reminiscent of Anderson talk-singing, \u201cBig Science, Hallelujah.\u201d) And both artists leaven their sober tone with bursts of occasional sweetness, even absurdity, as when on \u201cHeaven Is No Feeling\u201d Le Bon intones as though the song has been interrupted by a phone call: \u201cHello? \/ What does she want?\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not the only person to associate Anderson\u2019s \u201cBig Science\u201d with 9\/11, from its opening track, which details an air disaster (\u201cWe are going down \/ We are all going down, together\u201d) to its incantatory eighth track, \u201cO Superman (For Massenet),\u201d with its chilling observation: \u201cHere come the planes \/ They\u2019re American planes, made in America.\u201d Listening to \u201cBig Science\u201d now, I am struck by the way that it is a record of its time and yet also seems to forecast, with unnerving specificity, an era decades away. That\u2019s what a handful of artists do\u2014capture the moment, while predicting what lies ahead.<\/p>\n
Le Bon strikes me as similarly prophetic. That quality is in her sound more than it is in her language, though I still have the impulse to parse her oblique lyrics. On \u201cMichelangelo\u201d \u2019s first track, \u201cJerome,\u201d it\u2019s hard to say if Le Bon is singing about the saint, though it\u2019s plain from how the singer stretches the single syllables of \u201ccry\u201d and \u201cfall\u201d for almost five seconds each that this is a lament.<\/p>\n
At first, the album seems to be an elegy for lost love, treated with frankness: \u201cPieces of my heart erased \/ And nothing\u2019s gonna change.\u201d Love\u2019s disappointment is an evergreen subject, but here it\u2019s elevated by the idiosyncrasy of Le Bon\u2019s sound. \u201cIs It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?\u201d has a distorted, anxious, lo-fi-ish synthesizer, and an air of self-flagellation: \u201cI make jealous talk \/ I break my heart \/ Make a joke of love \/ And of living.\u201d Great songwriting often relies on grammar so private that it only makes sense to the performer. I don\u2019t know what Le Bon means by \u201cNo collateral joy \/ No favorite son \/ Just the love you gave \/ On the sideboard,\u201d but I know what to make of that past tense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a scene in Netflix\u2019s \u201cToo Much\u201d in which the heroine, an American transplant in London, listens to a playlist curated by her new British paramour. (Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe star as avatars of the show\u2019s creators, the writer-director Lena Dunham and her husband, the musician Luis Felber.) A lover reveals himself by sharing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2054753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[21990,21894,305446,21935,22149,382120],"class_list":["post-2054752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-albums","tag-artists","tag-folk-music","tag-indie","tag-musicians","tag-pop-musicians"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/The-Uneasy-Prophecies-of-Cate-Le-Bon.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2054752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2054753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}