"A coalition of inescapable feelings and fabricated nonsense," is how Cate Le Bon described her fourth studio album, Crab Day. A few years prior to its 2016 release, Cate’s mother unearthed her birth certificate, and admitted to her daughter that they'd had her birthday a day off for nearly three decades. That sense of misaligned reality is the guiding force on Crab Day, where Cate establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense—or make more nonsense—of some unnamed life rupture that's left her grasping.

Cate Le Bon follows Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense’ mantra and proves not making sense is the new making sense. Her surreal lyrics are endlessly wonderful and I love her niece’s idea of inventing ‘Crab Day’ instead of ‘April Fool’s Day’ because why not? Why not Cate Le Bon day next? She’s definitely worth celebrating and not just out of pity at the revelation that her parents had her birthday wrong for years which comes from the song ‘I Was Born on the Wrong Day’. Her wonky diversions from any musical formulae makes her one of the most exciting musicians of today and looking back on this album from 2016, it still sounds as fresh, forward-thinking and vivifying.

FFO: Mega Bog, Aldous Harding, Sweet Baboo, Jane Weaver.

By Martha