The Independent:

The debut release on Gruff Rhys's Irony Bored label, Me Oh My, shows Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon to be a strikingly different prospect to the recent run of new female singers - closer to wyrd-folkie than soul-diva, but blessed with a unique line in imagery, and a ramshackle innocence to her musical approach that recalls the third Velvet Underground album, if Mo Tucker had sung all the songs. Or indeed, Nico: there's an austere, uncertain otherworldliness about Le Bon's voice that echoes the late ice queen's, an impression heightened by the occasional moans of wheezing harmonium alongside her guitar. Blackness and night-time feature strongly throughout, as might be expected of someone who apparently only writes in the dark: the album's opening couplet is "I fought the night, and the night fought me/ Knocked on the door and used its key”, and elsewhere she sings evocatively of "Eyes so bright they just steal the night". And fittingly for an album whose early working title was "Pet Deaths", mortality stalks songs like "Burn Until the End" and "Digging Song", while "Hollow Trees House Hounds” has the kind of gothic-rustic surrealism that many admire in Bat for Lashes and Florence & the Machine. A musical icon for the Twilight generation, perhaps?

NME:

You'd think that starting your first bigtime public excursions playing keytar on 80s disco numbers about DeLorean cars as Cate Le Bon did with Gruff Rhys' Neon Neon last year could see you pigeon-holed. But now the Cardiff folkstress is ready to stand on her own two dainty feet.

Her debut album, the October-bound 'Me Oh My' (the first release on Rhys new label Irony Bored) is the next in a long line of great South Wales folk records that sets her up as a Valleys Nico. Sweet but sparse featuring deft violin from Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's Megan Childs, it conjures haunted castles, steaming tea on cold mornings and crunchy walks in woods.

Recorded in 10 days with Gorky's producer Kris Jenkins it replaced her long term project, the amazingly titled unreleased 'Pet Deaths', which she'd been recording on-off for so long it became a victim of its lack of deadline.

"We'd spend days puttmg more guitar tracks on more cowbell on we had buried the songs," Cate recalls. "So I killed it." Ruthless. Next up? "I'd like to record the next one somewhere exotic," she wistfully ponders. "Am I saying Cardiff's not exotic? Yes, I am." Jamie Fullerton

Uncut Magazine:

Despite never giving the impression of haste, Gruff Rhys must be the busiest man in faintly psychedelic Welsh indie rock. As well as his day job fronting Super Furry Animals, in recent years there's been the folky solo album, the Neon Neon project, numerous guest vocal appearances (Simian Mobile Disco being the latest beneficiaries of the distinctive Rhys croon), and a documentary film on Patagonian folk singer Rene Griffiths. His latest venture is a record label/multimedia enterprise called Irony Bored, to which Cardiff singer-songwriter and sometime Neon Neon member Cate Le Bon is the first signing.

Me Oh My is, broadly speaking, a folk record, but it's vitalised by a love of weird, arcane technology. The haunting title track is invaded by a BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style synthesiser that resembles a swarm of robot wasps – it could be a late-'60s psych-folk artefact rescued from the vaults by Johnny Trunk or Andy Votel. It's not so surprising to learn that Cate's band on this record includes various former members of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, the band who revived British freak folk a decade before it became fashionable to do so.

Le Bon herself sings in a crystal voice so accented and enunciated that, especially on "Digging Song", she sounds as much like Nico as she does Sandy Denny. Whether it's a nod to folk traditions or just a consequence of having grown up in rural West Wales, her lyrics are full of ominous elemental metaphors: tides splitting the land, hearts buried in the ground, the vengeance of lightning. "I fought the night and the night fought me," runs the album's opening line, and you'd be wise not to cross a woman who boasts of picking a fight with the darkness.

In truth, Me Oh My is a slender album, but there's much to recommend it. It's quirky and confident; mindful of tradition without getting bogged down in issues of authenticity. It's worth keeping an eye on what Cate Le Bon – and the Irony Bored label – does next. SAM RICHARDS

'Me Oh My' was the Debut of the month, November 2009 issue.

Word Magazine:

Weird and wonderful debut from Gruff Rhys' black-hearted collaborator. Celebrity spawn-watchers, fear not. Cate Le Bon is not the razor-bobbed daughter of the well-built Simon, but a wonderfully strange singer-songwriter from the wilds of west Wales. We first heard her sultry monotone when she sang I Lust U with Gruff Rhys' electro side project, Neon Neon, last year, but now her beguiling debut album reveals her true colours - black-hearted, folk-flavoured, and deeply psychedelic. The title track builds from bluesy, Bobbie Gentry guitars into a torrent of fuzz as a woman fights the night, pretends to a be a boy, then gets left for dead by a girl who creeps into her bed. Within the gentler arpeggios of Sad Sad Feet, Le Bon will "go blind to save you”, while in Terror Of The Man she begs you to "tear her from the land”. As cymbals crash and keyboards whirl, imagine PJ Harvey's rawness tangling with Super Furry Animals' prog, and a vocalist who forgoes folk's softer sides for delicious black humour. The lights of Neon Neon are long gone: here is darkness to relish. JUDE ROGERS

Artrocker:

The typical response most people have to the news that Cate Le Bon is releasing her debut album is "about fecking timel" - and indeed it is. You've probably heard her already of course, singing co-lead vocals on Neon Neon's excellent 'l Lust U' single, alongside Gruff Rhys of SFA. Now the Furries frontman is going a step further and releasing her first LP on his new record label, Irony Bored (named after some graffiti Gruff once scribbled on an ironing board, which was then stolen, mistaken for a work of art, hung in a gallery and... oh nevermind) The record is of course, magnificent. Typified by a ghostly folk atmosphere, it nonetheless makes diversions into psychedelic garage rock ('Burn Until The End') kung-fu soundtrack ('Terror ofthe Man' and fuzzed-up pop ('Hollow Trees House Hounds'). There's also a dignified kind of sadness that runs through the album, particularly on 'Sad Sad Feet' in which Le Bon quietly concedes that "baby, I'm heading for the black" with all the delicacy of a Celtic Beth Gibbons. Cate Le Bon has made a haunted forest of a record here, which with any justice will see her name lit up in neon (neon) lights before the year is out. Ric Rawlins

Mojo:

The bassist from Gruff Rhys's side project Neon Neon returned from a world tour to book 10 days in a Cardiff studio and record this singular psychedelic debut. Le Bon sounds both otherworldly and familiar as she pulls lilting vowels over menacing guitar riffs to tell tales of horror in the west Wales countryside.

Kruger Magazine:

If you have seen the Wicker Man with that fella from the Equaliser, I want you to hold that memory. If you can remember the soundtrack, then you'll have a good point of reference for Me Oh My. Let's just say you'll be able to hang on to this, and if Andy Votel hasn't already heard it I can guarantee that he'll bung you a few quid to own a copy. Sheer brilliance on the part of Miss Le Bon.