Cate Le Bon’s wondrous sixth album exists in a waking dreamscape whose locked-in grooves approach the unknowable at slanted angles.
“Faced with a choice, do both,” Brian Eno once proffered. On Cate Le Bon’s apocalyptically titled but sky-reaching sixth album, the Welsh art-pop iconoclast orients her bemused songs by the compass of this oblique strategy. Le Bon collages the saxophones and bass grooves of Pompeii into a heady harmonic mix of psychedelia and pop, awe and bewilderment, amplifying both her criss-crossing inscrutability and the inexhaustible pleasures of clarity. These inquisitive songs feel, to borrow a word from one of her lyrics, “multidirectional.”
Now based in California’s Mojave Desert—a peculiar, austere, and immersive landscape, not unlike that of her songs—Le Bon has been making records for her entire adult life. But she likened the process of her last, 2019’s Reward, to writing a first album. She had stepped back from music for a year to learn the craft of building practical objects—chairs and tables, specifically—while making a daily practice of listening to David Bowie. The creation of Le Bon’s next album would not be so methodical. Recording Pompeii at the pandemic’s peak, she fluctuated between hope and dread: “You can’t help but wonder if this is the last thing you’re ever going to make,” she said of her “mental polarization” then. “You’re swinging between ‘Oh, fuck’ and ‘Fuck it.’” Nodding to the crumbling nature of life as we knew it, and perhaps to her own excavation of buried memories, she named her record after a civilization in ruins beneath lava and ash. But there is a hidden optimism here: “Every fear that I have/I send it to Pompeii,” goes the titular chorus, turning the fossilized Roman city at once into an evocation of the end times and an incinerator for doubt when there is nothing left to lose.
Pompeii exists in the vivid waking dreamscape of Low and Bowie’s other late-’70s adventures, at times imagining a reality where he glittered up the production of John Cale’s wry surrealism instead of Lou Reed. But Le Bon’s particular streak of shape-shifting absurdism has its own poised and introspective post-punk lawlessness. Like her rawer, more spontaneous band DRINKS, a collaboration with Tim Presley, Pompeii sounds like music we are listening in on, and when Le Bon sings, it is with all the mystery of late-afternoon light casting streaks and shadows on the wall. Pompeii is her poppiest album, and yet one might picture Le Bon devising the title while watching her psych forebears rock amid ruins in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a scene with uncanny resonance in 2020: an isolated amphitheater with no audience, no feedback, the air unsettled.
If the locked-in grooves propelling Pompeii’s otherworldly textures make these nine tracks feel like one, that’s in part because Le Bon wrote primarily on the bass, which sings across this record as anchor and harmonizer. The record’s silvery tone has a similar unifying effect, inspired, as it were, by a painting of Le Bon in the guise of a nun by Tim Presley. (The actual album cover is a photographic portrait replicating the painting, which Le Bon could not bear to commodify.) In interviews, Le Bon has described how she and co-producer Samur Khouja stared at the artwork’s striking color scheme (amber, olive, Yves Klein blue) to guide the assembly of their own synth pallet—how dualities of light and dark, hope and fear, exist, for Le Bon, on the canvas. To further illuminate the beguiling divinity of Presley’s piece, Le Bon has cited a Rebecca Solnit essay on Virginia Woolf that reads: “Most people are afraid of the dark… many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure.” But Solnit is quick to clarify that this is the same darkness “in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted….” The spacious, improvisatory energy of Pompeii often contains the feeling of searching through this night. Its tone could be called the enchanted unknown.
Le Bon’s pristinely askew songwriting has always felt suspended between the desire to be understood versus the freedom of remaining furtively unplaceable. But more than ever—alongside Pompeii’s swarming tapestries of sax, clarinet, and synth lines—the directness and relative vulnerability of her songwriting voices a longing to connect. “What you said was nice/When you said my heart broke a century,” Le Bon sings sleekly on “Harbour,” a typically slanted image that is still charged with emotion. On the immaculate “Moderation,” Le Bon directs us to “picture the party where you’re standing on a modern age,” like a mantra for getting out of one’s head and into the world. When she sings of catching “a plastic bouquet/down the aisle” on “French Boys,” and feeling so woefully out of place, her misfit spirit is alive in every jigsaw note. Le Bon’s singing and Stella Mozgawa’s drumming can make Pompeii’s nervy rhythms feel physical and anthemic, like the Talking Heads’, and the way Le Bon pushes her voice heavenly high or tugs it down like a riptide—“You know, I’m not cold by nature,” she croons on “Running Away”—makes the songs sound as if they are constantly expanding at the edges.
One tune towers over Pompeii, an obvious testament to Le Bon’s recent ascent to Joshua Tree karaoke queen. She sings the title of “Moderation” in the album’s most irresistible hook—as in “Moderation/I can’t stand it”—and the song becomes a new wave ode to the act of obsession. (Joni Mitchell was in the desert, too, when she parsed the difference between artists such as herself, who “travel the breadth of extremities,” unlike those who “stick to some straighter line,” an implication that rings through “Moderation.”) “I get by, one eye on the sky, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Le Bon sings, as if narrating the tempestuous creative process itself. “I wanna cry, I’m out of my mind.” She renders chaos and control with audacity and beauty all her own.
“In the remake of my life, I moved in straight lines,” she sings on “Remembering Me,” but on Pompeii, she fortunately gives us the first cut. Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation. In her favored Solnit essay about Virginia Woolf, the author suggests that it’s the job of artists to explore beyond that which is easily knowable, to “go into the dark with their eyes open” and shine. What might one say from the depths of inexplicable darkness? “It’s my heart, it’s the beating of my heart,” Le Bon attests in her highest register on the title track, deep in the mix but unmistakable, tilted but clear. From note to note, Pompeii keeps you guessing, which is a way of knowing our hearts beat, too.
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