Fresh On The Net is a music blog hosted by Tom Robinson and Team Freshnet, offering independent artists an open door and a level playing field for their music. Our inbox is open at http://freshonthenet.co.uk every Monday to Thursday morning - if you share a track with us there it will be heard by every member of our moderation team.

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Wakefield’s finest psychedelic experimentalist. Bringing forth a plethora of colourful grooves and visual inspirations.
Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer.

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Official Soundcloud account of Bat for Lashes

Cooking Vinyl is an independent record label based in London, UK. A hugely diverse roster of acts are currently signed to the label, from The Darkness to legends including The Orb, Shed Seven, to veteran protest singer Billy Bragg, rave pioneers The Prodigy, plus Elles Bailey and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Cooking Vinyl has been in existence since 1986 and has issued over 400 releases in that time.

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.

Dark Horse is following