“Cate Le Bon returns with the fascinating, esoteric Reward”
“It is an intriguing image conjured by Cate Le Bon: days spent learning to craft furniture, evenings spent forging her latest record with nobody around to hear it. She withdrew for a year to live alone in the Lake District, an isolation that was everything she needed and didn’t need – “enforcing an absence in order to mourn it.” Reward is arresting and absurd; a rigorous examination of the self, wi”
“On her fifth album, the Welsh musician is at her best. The more elaborate and eccentric her music becomes, the more she sounds like herself.”
“The Welsh singer-songwriter brings art-pop grandeur on fifth studio album”
“There are several time-honoured options available to the artist who is a decade or so into their career and keen to reset their creativity. You can surround yourself with a fresh set of musicians, or hire a new producer whose approach to music seems markedly different to your own. You can self-consciously dabble in genres you’ve hitherto avoided, seeing how your songs adapt to an unsullied and une”
“Cate Le Bon’s Reward cleaves into two distinct halves, one that pulses with ideas and legible emotions and another that wanders, sputters, and jars under a pretense of free-associative experimentation. In her previous work, the Welsh musician has purveyed left-of-center, dreamy yet slightly discordant psych-folk. Blessed with both a classically gorgeous voice and an ear for friction and quirk, Le ”
