Máscaras, comprised of three Portland music scene veterans (members of Sun Angle, Deer or the Doe, O Bruxo, Cat Hoch, Paper/Upper/Cuts, and literally dozens of others), is what happens when an off-the-cuff jam session between friends really, really works. Even in its recorded form, “it’s a jam with themes that live and breathe,” the band says, “leaving room for the unexpected.” The trio, comprised of Papi Fimbres (drums), Theo Craig (bass), and Carlos Segovia (guitar), plays heavy, propellant psychedelic music with surf-rock twang and mathy sensibilities. They call it “maximalist indigenous psych,” and while it’s not exactly the kind of music that one would normally identify with Portland—these are, after all, three brown dudes in the whitest city in America—they have become local favorites since their low-key formation in 2013, placing third in Willamette Week’s prestigious annual Best New Band Poll earlier this year.

Máscara vs. Máscara, the band’s first proper release, is made up mostly of songs that were written in the band’s first few jam sessions, and they are bursting with the energy of invention. Opener “Burgers & Balrog” is a surf-rock micro-epic that squeals with spiraling riffage from Segovia; “City of Ruins” finds Fimbres pummeling his set as Segovia plays intricate, Assyrian-sounding licks; “NewYorican” features playful interaction between Segovia and Craig, while Fimbres whips out the shakers and plays a latin beat (Segovia and Fimbres also play in Orquestra Pacifico Tropical, a cumbia group with over a dozen members). These are urgent, intense songs, but they’re also playful. It’s the sound of three homies making exactly the music they want to make, for no one else but themselves. It just so happens that people love it.

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"Meet your fav cool lil secret #FlorDeToloache not 'your fav mariachi band' or “your new fav girl group” nah…. so beyond that man" - Questlove

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.

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