In 1983, Fiction Factory’s Kevin Patterson was already swooning about the emotional turmoil of love in »Feels Like Heaven« – more precisely, about its bittersweet end. Forty years later, Cate Le Bon picks up that very ambivalence on Michelangelo Dying, but waves farewell to any idealised notions right in the album title – just as modern art once broke away from the glorified perspectives of the Renaissance. Almost accusatory, her elfin voice proclaims in the opening track: »Heaven Is No Feeling« – heaven is no feeling, you damned romantics!
Behind the playfulness of her melodies and the enigmatic lyrics lies the full emotional spectrum of love’s less pleasant side. Head and heart are equally challenged as you drift through the record’s ethereal sound and try to parse lines like: »You smoke our love like you’ve never known violence.« But it’s just as valid to simply surrender to the album’s silk-gloved drama – especially when John Cale makes his unexpectedly tender guest appearance in »Ride«, singing of what might be his final journey. Michelangelo Dying doesn’t reinvent itself – but it does complete a narrative arc. In the end, Le Bon encounters love again and again, loss – and, as she herself puts it, herself.
