By coalescing a number of everyday influences – from Television to John Cale – and adding her own distinctive formula, Crab Day doesn’t really sound like anything else out there.
The effects Crab Day will leave on listeners are priceless.
Crab Day is a voyage into doubt led by a queasy compass, and a ringleader who's prepared to stake out uncertain territory. Le Bon always keeps you guessing, making the old traditions of guitar-oriented rock feel arbitrary, too.
The beauty of Crab Day is that it can be dismantled and its individual components laid bare to reveal itself as a stunning work of alchemical mastery, or it can be enjoyed simply as a singular, coherent musical object which still aims to disrupt the segregationist agenda of a corporate-run, institutionalized music machine.
Since rising to attention with 2009's Me Oh My, Cate Le Bon has turned out four albums of arch, otherworldly guitar pop, of which Crab Day is surely the best yet.
Crab Day is a madcap wonder, and if its singular aesthetic is ultimately less an advancement of the vision and more a honing of the craft, its offbeat artistry is way beyond the everyday humdrum.
Crab Day is an idiosyncratic and imaginative record, with fresh highlights appearing on every listen.
A few years in the California sun doesn’t seem to have affected Cate Le Bon’s music too much, and thank goodness for that. She’s always had an ear for the tuneful — and the abstruse — and her fourth album, Crab Day, doesn’t find her deviating from that left field trajectory.
It's more of an invitation to wonder than it is a self-explanatory LP, which makes for a powerful resonance with Le Bon's exciting new beginning.
Crab Day is a largely canonical affair, despite all of the extra window dressing.
Rather than achieving that undeniable emotional pull, Crab Day ends up taxing, rather than delighting, the listener.
While the art-wonk approach is naturally distancing, songs like ‘I’m A Dirty Attic’, ‘Yellow Blinds, Cream Shadows’, ‘We Might Revolve’ and ‘How Do You Know’ include just enough melodic allure to draw you into Cate’s world of crustacean crookedness.
Le Bon’s Crab Day is a place you’d like to visit occasionally but maybe not stay because whilst you will undoubtedly happen upon some wonderful views, sometimes its a bloody uncomfortable place to be: the sound of an artist exploring new terrains while falling apart in front of our ears. Its a curious oddity indeed.
It's defiantly idiosyncratic and at times genuinely bonkers, yet despite that, Crab Day never once feels willfully obtuse or--that dreadful work--"kooky."
Mug Museum is one of my favourite records of all time and this did not let me down in the slightest. The instrumentals are fuller, but the intimate and warm sense of nostalgia remains in tact.
A really fun record, especially in a lyrical sense. She is truly one of the best songwriters around at the moment.
Best tracks: Wonderful, We Might Revolve, Yellow Blinds, Cream Shadows and What's Not Mine.
1 | Crab Day 3:49 | 88 |
2 | Love Is Not Love 3:01 | 63 |
3 | Wonderful 2:36 | 88 |
4 | Find Me 2:51 | 75 |
5 | I'm a Dirty Attic 3:06 | 88 |
6 | I Was Born on the Wrong Day 2:17 | 88 |
7 | We Might Revolve 3:47 | 100 |
8 | Yellow Blinds, Cream Shadows 4:02 | 63 |
9 | How Do You Know? 3:25 | 75 |
10 | What's Not Mine 7:26 | 50 |
#7 | / | Piccadilly Records |
#11 | / | musicOMH |
#16 | / | Q Magazine |
#21 | / | FLOOD |
#26 | / | Uncut |
#74 | / | Fopp |
#90 | / | Rough Trade |