‘Crab Day’ is at turns agitated and serene. At one moment it’s starkly personal, at others it’s prickly in its idiosyncrasies. In Cate Le Bon’s own words, it’s a melange of “inescapable feelings and fabricated nonsense”.
In following up the rich, warm ‘Mug Museum’, Le Bon has taken sandpaper to the varnish, exposing the rough grain underneath. The guitars here are sharp and reedy, the percussion unpredictable. Her melodies, while still perfectly formed, are often framed alone and only glimpsed briefly.
These are pop songs that might have turned the head of Luis Buñuel, such is the creeping sense of something being just a little off.
“Love is not love,” Le Bon sings on the song of the same name, holding a circus mirror up to a Shakespeare sonnet. "When it's a coathanger." She has in one hand the thing that’s supposed to bind us together and in the other something entirely functional.
Surrealism isn’t an easy sell. It can be whimsical and alluring, just as it can be frightening in its disregard for what’s up and what’s down. Le Bon makes that divisiveness her own. ‘Crab Day’ is alive with contradictions, competing imagery and instrumentation that further enforces its unpredictability. “I want to make sense with you,” she sings on I’m a Dirty Attic. “I’m a body of dreams for you.”
Its collected flights of fancy never entirely drift free of their moorings, though. I Was Born On The Wrong Day has its roots in Le Bon’s birthday having been celebrated on, you guessed it, the wrong day for much of her life. Then there’s the title, which stems from her niece’s renaming April Fools’ Day after taking a dislike to its sentiment. “It’s an exploration of that idea of how something can be hugely important to one person and mean absolutely nothing to anybody else,” she said in a recent interview with DIY.
Le Bon’s band, long-time collaborators Stephen Black and H. Hawkline plus Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, rustle up a thousand weird asides that only enhance the record’s greatest strengths. Amid flailing glockenspiel, the thud of bari sax and guitar refrains that appear half-finished, if not half-remembered, are songs that underline her uncanny gifts as a composer and expressive vocalist.
The melodies, when they come out from their hiding places, are wonderful. From the plaintive Love Is Not Love to the muted majesty of Yellow Blinds, Cream Shadows, ‘Crab Day’ is never short of a pleasant surprise to play off the tricks up its sleeve. Le Bon’s world is one that we are lucky to get glimpses of, even if we might not always understand or feel comfortable in it.
Cate Le Bon Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sat May 21 2016 - BRISTOL Lantern
Sun May 22 2016 - BIRMINGHAM Glee Club
Mon May 23 2016 - MANCHESTER Gorilla
Tue May 24 2016 - GLASGOW Stereo
Wed May 25 2016 - LEEDS Brudenell Social Club
Thu May 26 2016 - LONDON Oval Space
Fri May 27 2016 - BRIGHTON Patterns
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