nice bass riff, tasty guitars, welsh accent vocal... like it! :D

HoBeats - part 3

Is It Real?

Lost Marbles and Exploded Evidence

Knock That Door

Daffodils

Daffodils (feat. Kevin Parker)

Cat in the Hat

Wrong or Right

Phase Zero

Some Sunsick Day

We Were So Turned On: A Tribute To David Bowie

Ashes to Ashes

The Rip Tide

Santa Fe

Mug Museum

Are You with Me Now?

Tinseltown Swimming in Blood

Freedom

Miki Dora

Poolside - Kiss You Forever

Jumping the Shark

Happy Ending

Trans-Atlantic Psych Classics, Vol.2

Dreams (feat. Shawn Lee & Adrian Quesada)

Cate Le Bon is an artist hailing from Carmarthenshire, rural West Wales. Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum as well as 2016s Crab Day and the Mercury Award nominated Reward, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on the recent John Grant album, Boy From Michigan, or  Deerhunter's Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?  (4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster.

New album Pompeii bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Sonically minimal in parts, its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales.

The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

Are You with Me Now?

Cate Le Bon

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