Cate Le Bon: Michelangelo Dying (digital outlets)

Cate Le Bon has been carrying the banner of intelligent art-pop – in the wake of Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson and others – for many albums now.

And there are places and passages on this typically ambitious album where her voice could be removed and you'd still be seduced by the sheer cleverness and dexterousness of the arrangements and instrumentation.

In the last third of Mothers of Riches (“let yourself fold”) that's exactly what happens and you can't help but lock yourself into the relentless groove as the walls of synths and crystalline guitars push ever onward.

And you wouldn't need to be told John Cale is on Ride because from the off it sounds like she's singing one of the stalking pieces from his last albums Mercy (2023) and POPtical Illusion (2024).

For all that this is an album addressing the end of a relationship, the processing of that ("this is how we come undone, it's in the tugging of the reins" on Pieces of My Heart) and re-evaluating her life anew back home in Cardiff after time living in Joshua Tree, the album is abundantly rich in its conception and execution, not as morose as all that background suggests. Again, the music is a bathe in itself.

Lyrically she's as cryptic as ever and her words often require decoding, yet there is also clarity, as on Body As A River: “I read what I write and it’s never without shame. In the pages lost, I’m holding on to sorrow and lust.”

Her constrained theatricality – evident again on the striking cover – is one of her virtues in that it persuasively sells her songs.

But time and again you come back to the sheer musicality of her songs, half familiar from Bush, Gabriel et al perhaps but always with her own signature.

Cate Le Bon doesn't do easy . . . but neither is she difficult.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here