Let Cate Le Bon’s songs be your favorite sweaters. They’ll be the soft ones that will feel right for any occasion, and they will keep you warm because you may already be intimately familiar with the material.
After listening to her music, it may come as no surprise that The Velvet Underground are an oft-cited source of inspiration for her. And though it’s true that the Nico comparisons to her voice are more of a rule than an exception, Le Bon has managed to trade the laconic melodrama for more jangle and range. Despite the Welsh singer’s lyrical fixation with darker matters surrounding death and loneliness, her songs are surprisingly accessible and relatable. With her latest album, Mug Museum, each song really does seem to have its own special pattern and unique blend of instrumental fibers, and though they all come with the slightest notion that you’ve heard them before, you certainly won’t tire of hearing them time and time again.
In preparation for her show at The Frequency this Friday, we’ve picked a few of our favorite song sweaters from her musical wardrobe. You may find yourself wanting to try more on for size, but here are a few to get you started:
“Are You With Me Now?”
“Are You With Me Now?” stays musically upbeat despite its tragic subject matter, the loss of a loved one. In this case, it was the death of Le Bon’s grandmother that stirred the question up as the inspiration for one of the strongest tracks on her latest album. Everything from the thoughtful guitar riffs and the lilts in her voice when she asks the eponymous question will stamp a feeling in your chest of a deeply felt tragedy that has not been fully reconciled. When she sings “There is a feeling I love / buried in my brow,” it’s hard to imagine that these lingering feelings for someone could ever truly go away.
“Cuckoo Through the Walls”
This song finds Le Bon at her Nico-est. The steady bass beat evokes the image of a beat poet wearing all black, with bored, half-lidded eyes peering out into a smoke-filled room. True to this track’s name, madness eventually creeps through the cool veneer — as the song continues, the guitar zigs and zags itself into a quiet frenzy, and Le Bon breaks it all with half-sung, half-spoken words at the very end.
“I Think I Knew”
Fans of Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, may be pleasantly surprised to hear him in this lovely duet with Le Bon. Their voices blend beautifully to sing about a sad, aching truth of all relationships — it is about the things that one can come close to understanding about a person before realizing that certain unknowns will always stay that way. It’s when they switch from singing “I think I knew” to “I wish I knew” that makes this so.
“Falcon Eyed”
This track, the first off her previous album, Cyrk, is a fun one that shows off her musical range and the aesthetic contrast between songs off Cyrk and Mug Museum. It’s evident that Le Bon is an inventive artist whose music will continue to evolve to echo sounds of the familiar, with feeling.