2022

27 Demos

California Shake

Pompeii

Cry Me Old Trouble

Remembering Me

Crazy

Next to Normal

Funny Girl

Wild

On Your Own Love Again

Moon Dude

Jessica Pratt

Bushel Hyde

Mother Big River

White noise, late night, just the static.
Your low voice,
It's automatic.
You call it trouble.
I call it classic.

Don't want the daylight.
No
Don't want the cure.
You're the shadow.
You're the lure.

This ain't simple. this ain't safe.
But I just need the aftertaste.
Yeah, I found my fix.
Found my fix...

New wave, fast track, we're electric.
Ignore the logic,
So magnetic.
We’re the fast-lane.
The perfect wreckage.

Don't want the surface.
No
Don't want the known.
Just the echo.
On the phone.

This ain't simple. this ain't safe.
But I just need the aftertaste.
Yeah, I found my fix.
Found my fix...

They want the highlight.
They want the best.
I want the poison.
I want the rest.

This ain't simple. this ain't safe.
But I just need the aftertaste.
Yeah, I found my fix.
Found my fix...

Aftertaste...

I Call It Classic

Dedicated to Bobby Jameson

Another Weekend

Colour Green

Tonight

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.

Remembering Me

Cate Le Bon

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