Crab Day

“It doesn’t pay to sing your songs,” sings Cate Le Bon on her new album, Crab Day. It’s the follow-up to her fantastically aimless 2013 release Mug Museum, and a fitting companion to 2015’s Hermits on Holiday, her collaborative project with White Fence’s Tim Presley under the name DRINKS. Similarly erratic here, Le Bon’s lethargy is wistfully delivered in a droll Nico drawl, her Welsh accent supplying a cruel seduction in tandem with rudimentary, playful songs that sound as if performed by a cavalcade of psychedelic druids. Tightly plotted arrangements and repetitive lyrics round out laissez-faire tracks like “What’s Not Mine,” which pays more than a passing nod to John Cale and Lou Reed. Elsewhere, “I’m a Dirty Attic” finds Le Bon at her most diabolical, pleading in her own unaffected timbre the caveats of her personality, alternately sunny and stormy, reflecting the mood of her largely endearing musical soundscape. Hers is an addictive pseudoscience best heard in moments of extreme bliss or extreme depression. It’s magically unambitious, and it sounds great.