★★★★☆
Crab Dayisn’t an album.
It’s a cathedral, at once intensely solid and yet utterly without weight – a stone hand reaching up to God. It also happens to be the most perfectly articulated record Cate Le Bon has yet turned in, a sterling work that comes replete with its own fully internalised logic.
Better still, nothing about it is obvious or obnoxious. Though the common thread throughout the record is Le Bon – her creative voice is so distinct that it now feels justifiable to use ‘Le Bon-esque’ as a quantifier – she blows out her thematic material so as to make it universal. ‘I’m A Dirty Attic’ might boast some of the strangest lyrics around, but somehow you understand the song even when you don’t really understand it. “I wanna make sense with you,” Le Bon spits, cheekily underscoring her own absurdity.
It’s safe to say the record is weird, then, albeit in a way that calls to mind Pee-Wee Herman more than David Lynch. ‘We Might Revolve’ and ‘How Do You Know?’ are like jokes written by children – touching and unreservedly odd tracks that come with their punchlines cut off.
Crab Day is all hard edges and raw, nervous choruses, and through its utter refusal to conform it takes on true punky significance.
