Crab Day
Cate Le Bon invented “Crab Day” as a cheery, eccentric alternative to April Fool’s Day. It’s a beautifully fitting name for her fourth album. *Crab Day* finds the Welsh artist in rarefied indie air: this is a playful, abstract record full of lyrical sharp turns, twitchy cleverness, and nimble post-punk grooves set off by those richly accented vocals a move to L.A. hasn’t dimmed. What her California emigration has provided is some sonic sunshine. The jiving title track, wonky “Wonderful,” and twinkling “Yellow Blinds, Cream Shadows,” in particular, feel like liberated recipients of some joyous creative abandonment.
"A coalition of inescapable feelings and fabricated nonsense, each propping the other up. Crab Day is an old holiday. Crab Day is a new holiday. Crab Day isn't a holiday at all." — C. Le Bon
On her fourth album, the Welsh singer Cate Le Bon establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense of some unnamed life rupture that's left her gasping.
From such askew romantic sentiments as “my heart’s in my liver” (‘Wonderful’) and “love is not love when it’s a cold hammer” (‘Love Is Not Love’) we can fathom that she’s over the deaths of various pets that inspired her earlier albums, yet ‘Crab Day’ bristles with a stark, scratchy pop desolation that suggests deeper fractures.
In ‘Crab Day’, her tilted ear for expression continues to rule the roost, with her compositions only growing more dissonant.
Back in the Eighties, when Lush’s first recordings appeared, it was still unusual for a band to feature more than a lone female presence, so they were trailblazers of a sort - if “trailblazing” is an apt term to apply to their shoegazing style. Oddly, their ingenue charm works more effectively in this mature reunion mode than in the gamine original: “Out Of Control” is a natural extension of that style, with Miki Berenyi’s murmurous vocals and Emma Anderson’s droning guitars creating rolling dream-pop waves, and “Lost Boy” showcasing their trademark chorus-effect guitar jangle. Romance remains their core theme, although “Rosebud” strikes out for the harsher terrain of thoughtless cruelty: “They’re just having some fun/How is it wrong, if you’re wearing a smile?”. A welcome return.
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Crab Day is a madcap wonder – if its aesthetic is ultimately less an advancement and more a honing, its offbeat artistry is way beyond the humdrum.
There's greater beauty in imagination than there is in information, and Cate Le Bon knows it. "Crab Day is an old holiday. Crab Day is a new holiday.
'Crab Day' by Cate Le Bon, album review by Gregory Adams. The full-length comes out on April 15th on all formats via Drag City/Turnstile Records.
After third album Mug Museum, Welsh art-popper Cate Le Bon has turned the last of her pottery-wheel twee and, on Crab Day, creates a springy rubber-band-ball of angular guitar, squalling saxophone and elastic basslines.
Crab Day is her fourth full-length and first under her own name since 2013’s Mug Museum.
An art-rock winner from the now California-based Welsh maverick. Review by Kieron Tyler