A new collaboration is added to Cate Le Bon's sound universe: “Always The Same”, a song shared with St. Vincent, born during the sessions of “Michelangelo Dying”, the album released last September. Left out of the final setlist, the piece however retains the same hallucinatory and fluctuating atmosphere that runs through the album, built on opaque synthesizers and deliberately unstable sound trajectories.
Le Bon, long a central figure of the most restless and visionary art-pop, here finds a natural accomplice in Annie Clark. Despite having chosen less explicitly avant-garde writing in recent years, St. Vincent maintains a similar sensitivity, capable of communicating without friction with the sound world of the Welsh musician. The result is a piece that seems to move in a liminal space: close to the aesthetic heart of “Michelangelo Dying”, but autonomous enough to require a life of its own. Watch the video below.
Le Bon herself explains this choice, in a note accompanying the release of the single: “'Always The Same' needed a little more room for maneuver than the album could grant it, but it remains a close relative of the 'Michelangelo Dying' song cycle, born in the same breath. It is a special song for me because it hosts a dear friend and a formidable artist like St. Vincent, who occupies the space around me with composure and gravitas, while I move in the murky waters of love.”
“Always The Same” thus presents itself as a sort of lateral extension of the album: not a simple one outtakesbut a significant deviation, which brings into focus an artistic dialogue that is as sober as it is intense.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
