by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
Cate Le Bon’s 2010s were spent establishing a pop language. First it was shrouded in stoned epiphanies, then took dada-esque left-turns, yet it never lost its sheer maverick energy. The one-two punch of Crab Day and Reward weren’t just refinements of a writing style, but cementings of a methodology and approach to sound. “Sound doesn't go away. In habitual silence, it reinvents the surface of everything you touch,”. This isn’t even a quote from the litany of press reviews that has been circling on the recording of Pompeii (her latest for Mexican Summer). It’s a lyric from about a minute into opener “Dirt on the Bed,” nestled in the second verse. Perhaps this is one of the few discernible pieces that provides a key of sorts towards Le Bon’s own sonic universe. “Some noise about some noise” is another lyric that could be equally as apt or inscrutable depending on your mileage.
Le Bon writes with her body and her movements convey punch-drunk unknowable truths, not just through her voice that evokes longing. On Crab Day, where dada was a path to understanding, her sound’s freewheeling spider guitar music puzzled and kick danced its way into existence. Reward’s invocations of lost wisdom may have only had a quarter of that kind of freewheeling sense, often ebbing in stilted, bittersweet fashion; it still created a newfound sidestep with its lovelorn horns and spaced synth. Pompeii errs rather close to the latter across its nine songs, twiddling with a few horns here to be extra soppy and refining the synthesizers for extra woozy. The tracks invoke languid motions of a terminal present. In the case of one like “Harbour” or the title track, it leisurely saunters and fills the space.
On these elements alone, I found myself muttering “Cate le Bon ‘Cate le Bon’d’” her latest album because it was just such a clean execution of her strengths. Every crevice of these nine tracks dare to become your new obsession if this sound clicks. Naturally though, that’s not the whole story; my ears were tuning to a novum. Pompeii happens to feature a reverb-saturated guitar easy to become enamored with. It’s an element that her last two releases have evaded. Yet every song it is featured on, whether as a trusted rhythm element or shock show-stealer, feels like an epiphany. Most notably being “Remembering Me,” where it bolts from the blue as a killer solo; to try and pinpoint it’s exact vintage/lineage feels too coy, it’s a novel sound of the year for my book.
That guitar and synthesizer refinement also happens to have been a source of major reference point whiplash I’ve had the experience of noting. Nearly half the tracks sound like dead ringers for Deerhunter’s Fading Frontier, an album which continues to make more sense with each passing year. That Le Bon and Bradford Cox have worked together (Le Bon produced the last, overlooked Deerhunter album alongside a series of recordings from Marfa) and their respective sounds would rub off on each other seems a natural extension. Cox, like Le Bon, has written with their body and memories extensively–although recently with a fascination towards outward, larger scale details. Yet, while both share a fascination for frontier spaces (Le Bon’s recently been outed as the “jukebox queen of Joshua Tree” and she fancies a walk around European nuclear plants), Pompeii is less concerned with images of open spaces rather than oblique strategies and treaties on love and self.
Turning back to “Remembering Me” is the clearest indication of what sets Le Bon as singular yet parallel to Cox. It happens to be Le Bon’s most singular piece of pop confessionalism to date. Between hyperbolic bouts that attempt to re-write her history as a solo artist that didn’t need anyone on her own luck “arriving just to seat the choir and bowled them over,” Le Bon offers a damning chorus imagining herself “face down in heirlooms,” declaring “I must leave the house, I don’t wanna be on my own”. Is this an auto-fiction recasting the tale of the Reward chair making process? Is it its own variation of They Might Be Giants’ “I don’t want to live in this world anymore!” from “Don’t Let's Start?” Le Bon’s lyricism on Pompeii often thrives on these types of whiplashes. Less refracted than Reward, it still invokes vulnerability with Le Bon’s motives (like “Moderation”), while also dead-eye staring down “French Boys” or contemplating a lost city to send fear towards while “putting pain into stone” on Pompeii. They’re dispatches that paired to this sound, invoke a body tumbling and redefining itself.