Pompeii

Description

Pompeii, Cate Le Bons sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any dissection of immediacy, says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe global pandemic plus climate emergencys colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. What would be your last gesture? she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls an economy of time warp where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lavaor sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, Dirt on the Bed, Sound doesnt go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although obscured, challenges Le Bons tendencies towards irony. 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. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bons studio process as exits were sealed, she granted herself permission to annihilate identity. Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected as her punk assessments of existence emerged. Enter Le Bons signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinitys modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning.