Crab Day

Her nervy assessments of the world are filled with equal parts suspense and heart, and beautifully zany riffs, where the feeling of being frayed by uncertainty comes together into a strangely comforting patchwork.

Approached from any direction, Crab Day is a fully featured, dazzling example of Cate Le Bon’s boundlessly surprising versatility.

The songs on Crab Day are more vivid in memory than when they’re playing. There’s distress at the edges that’s hard to source, but as they spin apart in performance, they lodge in the brain.

Asking familiar questions in downright bizarre ways, with a musical palette that continues to revel in awkwardness, slipperiness, and experimentation, Cate Le Bon is a dab hand at holding a warped mirror up to life, and reflecting things in unexpected ways by now.

It’s cacophonous but also whimsical, thanks to Le Bon’s detached narration.

[A] charming and sometimes startling record.

Crab Day, like its predecessor (the staggering Mug Museum), is underpinned by a bold stoicism far removed from calculable, sweetened melodics. Yet, when it really sparks, as on the mesmerising coda of eight-minute closer What's Not Mine or We Might Revolve (a spare, insistent pummel that recalls the fidgety formalism of early Throwing Muses), it yields an emotional resonance that is difficult to deny and impossible to resist.

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. [May 2016, p.75]

Crab Day looks set to achieve that rarely achieved goal of raising the game while keeping the faithful happy.

The music's trickiness never seems gratuitous, though, because the changes in direction correspond to a lyrical stance that articulates the struggle to figure out what's constant in a world of change. [No. 131, p.59]

Crab Day is an idiosyncratic and imaginative record, with fresh highlights appearing on every listen.

There are moments of overt post-punk motifs ("What's Not Mine"), swirling psychedelia ("Find Me"), and even nods to a more primal singer/songwriter blueprint scattered across Crab Day. 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.

Le Bon's clever and often abstract turns of both melody and phrase are abundant throughout.

Across Crab Day, though, there is a lightness to Le Bon’s arrangements. She doesn’t go for dramatic shifts in tempo or tones, which makes subtle additions more obvious.

She over-eggs the pudding occasionally, but that’s a small price to pay for adventure.

Crab Day marks a considerable step forward, appealing to existing fans while also announcing a huge period of growth.

You might feel less tolerant of its jarring arrangements and musical whimsy were it not for the moments of melodic sweetness that surface, as on the wistful Love Is Not Love. But this is still a wonderfully disordered junkshop of a record and a pleasure to explore.

Sometimes it's a bit repetitive or her voice goes trebly, but then you get What's Not Mine's Bjork-style weirdness. [May 2016, p.92]

It's defiantly idiosyncratic and at times genuinely bonkers, yet despite that, Crab Day never once feels willfully obtuse or--that dreadful work--"kooky." [May 2016, p.105]