Pompeii by Cate Le Bon
Although Cate Le Bon is geographically from Wales, artistically she’s also from that ethereal realm where Tori Amos and Kate Bush spend time. Dreaming in that realm has combined with isolation in this realm on Le Bon’s sixth solo album, Pompeii.
Le Bon largely accompanies herself: composing the songs on bass, she colors and shades them with her own piano, synthesizer, percussion and characteristically, deceptively simple guitar parts.
Two regular collaborators, Stephen Black and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, add his saxophone and clarinet and her drums, with Younghusband’s Euan Hinshelwood providing more sax. And those saxophones are immediately present and disorienting from the beginning of “Dirt on the Bed,” itself the unsteadying opener here.
Le Bon’s voice is particularly off-kilter on the track, yawing from flat lows to broken highs, wavering around the bassline as if half-chasing, half-avoiding it, and veering deliberately away from tunefulness.
It has to be deliberate, because Le Bon is back in tune with the next track, “Moderation,” and everything else—saxophone, bassline, rhythm—is as smooth and groovy, in the style of New Wave pop, as everything on “Dirt on the Bed” is not.
Pompeii makes many shifts like that, until it resembles a Talking Heads album like 1979’s Fear of Music, albeit with slower tempos and softer introspection a la the Go-Betweens in the early 1980s. However, Le Bon is more reliant on herself than any individual in those bands at those times, and almost aloof as a result.
“I’m not cold by nature,” she sings, at a temperature closer to freezing than to boiling, in “Running Away,” but she is reserved, and the tension between artistic passion and unearthly cool keeps Pompeii as intelligent and interesting as the work of Le Bon’s fellow Welsh musical artiste John Cale. Both are neither too grounded nor too airy.
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