Cate Le Bon – Me Oh My

Cate le Bon - Me Oh My

With her vampish bowl-haircut and blackened eyelids, Welsh chanteuse Cate Le Bon could pass as the third member of Telepathe. Only sonically, she’s opted to eschew layers of stroke-of-midnight hypnotics for simple, stark compositions, taking the listener to intimate places and keeping firm hold of those achingly hipster credentials.

And who knew things were getting so morbid over the border these days? Me Oh My, Le Bon’s witching (half) hour, was recorded for mentor and Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys’ Irony Bored label after she appeared on his Neon Neon side-project album, Stainless Style. But whereas the sleazy electro glide of the track in question, ‘I Lust U’, didn’t allow for the eccentricities of her Nico-imbued vocal or her urge to write about death and darkness, the fact she initially wanted to call this debut ‘Pet Deaths’ speaks volumes about what fascinates her most.

From the first solemn line – “I fought the night and the night fought me” it’s a sometimes spooky sometimes melancholic tension that she weaves. Take the first few gentle, subdued bars of the title track, or the downright unsettling ‘The Terror of the Man’, which uses poignant repetition to claustrophobic effect. The lamenting ‘Burn Until the End’ starts off all sombre vocal and eerie acoustics before augmenting into a crashing wall-of-noise wigout, while ‘Sad Sad Feet’s sleepy backbeat sees the singer “headed for the black” in wistful, regretful mode

Throughout, Le Bon’s vocal manages to walk the line between smudged vulnerability and a clipped kookiness, albeit always treading an individual path. Charm, talent and credibility are three things the girl has in spades, so what’s so frustrating about Me Oh My is its complete lack of memorability and absence of focal points. While the beefy guitar of ‘Hollow Trees Home Hounds’ adds some meat to what’s so far a rather brittle skeleton and ‘Shoeing the Bones’ comes the closest to being an unforgettable song, there remains a complete lack of hooks or choruses. It’s palpable that Le Bon has got the goods, now she just needs to know what to do with them. Sadly though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that after a first listen, her moonlit world is a pleasant yet inanimate experience, and not one you’d desperately need to return to.

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