Cate Le Bon, Photographs by Shannyn Higgins
The morning after Cate Le Bon’s gig at Melbourne Town Hall, I was flicking through the digital version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies card deck.
There was one card that seemed to neatly sum up Le Bon’s latest album, Michelangelo Dying, songs from which accounted for the majority of the setlist. “Turn it upside down,” it said.
Prior to releasing Michelangelo Dying last September, Le Bon was already one of the most distinct songwriters, vocalists and producers in contemporary indie music. Her two previous records, Reward and Pompeii, were distinguished as much by their melodic and rhythmic immediacy as by their wonky harmony and abstruse lyricism.
But on Michelangelo Dying, her seventh album, Le Bon didn’t just turn things upside down sonically – the album periodically sounds like it was recorded in a bath – but also psychically and spiritually, and in doing so, she created her most vital body of work.
This is not to suggest that the album’s swishing emotional undercurrents and candid lyrics are the result of some creativity-prompting game. Michelangelo Dying is representative of a broader project of turning one’s life upside down; an agonising and doubt filled lurch forward, but also an essential act of skin shedding and renewal.
I began this year thinking about being broken. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to break, but that I wanted to acknowledge my brokenness, and to recognise its role in constituting my wholeness. Another way of putting this is that I didn’t want to regard my better, more flattering qualities as definitive and my thornier, more challenging qualities as aberrations that could be smoothed over and forgotten about. Rather, I wanted to accept that all of it – the charming and the tedious – is part of me, and therefore deserving of love.
Michelangelo Dying is essentially a break-up album: it was written after a long-term romantic relationship came to an end. But rather than a play-by-play of who wronged who and where things went awry, Le Bon offers a candid appraisal of post-relationship grief. The album deals with many forms of loss – loss of love, familial ties, language, context, hydration – but it never descends into hopelessness, as Le Bon’s radiant performance at Melbourne Town Hall demonstrated.
From the opening song, Jerome, onwards, it was apparent how much life there is in these songs. The show’s two major highlights, Is it Worth It? (Happy Birthday) and Heaven Is No Feeling, found Le Bon contending with the challenge of confidently articulating one’s sense self while still grappling with a relationship’s crumbling edifice. Meanwhile, her terrific band slathered the Town Hall in a woozy heft made up of warped guitar tones, keys, acoustic and electronic drums, and duelling saxophones and bass guitars.
There was plenty of rhythmic jitteriness and the occasional departure into six-way discord. It all served to turn one’s perception upside down, and to emphasise that we must approach our brokenness with tenderness.
The setlist featured a few favourites from Reward and Pompeii, including the night’s closing song, Remembering Me, the chorus of which sounded newly urgent following the songs from Michelangelo Dying.
“Good grief, you miss so much,” Le Bon sang. “Oh, remember me.”
Cate Le Bon performed at Melbourne Town Hall, on the stolen land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on Wednesday 3 June.
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