The sound of Pompeii is joyful, curious, always willing to step just outside the boundaries of the expected, even when there’s an anxiety that bubbles up underneath. There’s a kind of magic to it that defies the idea of demos and scratch takes. It’s not as easy to make out the sketches in a song like opener “Dirt on the Bed,” a spacious matrix of metal-pipe percussion, layers of saxophone and liquid basslines. On Pompeii she takes that to a more dramatic extreme, she and Khouja during the album’s sessions having broken songs down, built them up and so on until they became something better than where they began. One of Le Bon’s greatest strengths is in taking the relatively straightforward core of a song-three or four chords-and pulling it into shapes that somehow sound less recognizable, more curious and abstracted. Each song is meticulously arranged, with Le Bon performing most of the instruments herself, save (as with Reward) for saxophone and drums, creating an atmosphere of abundance even in solitude. Hearing a Cate Le Bon song has always felt like occupying a new and unfamiliar space, but that space has never seemed so richly adorned as it does here. It isn’t overstuffed or unnecessarily busy, but thoughtfully and creatively composed-a kind of auditory feng shui. Where Reward sounded like an echo of the open space that surrounds it, Pompeii is more of an act of filling up that blank canvas the best way that Le Bon knows how. Which is as strong an endorsement of cabin fever as you’ll ever hear. When the pandemic hit, she, her partner Tim Presley and producer Samur Khouja decamped to a friend’s house in Wales, creating what she refers to as “a product of three people losing their minds in a terrace house” in an interview with The Guardian. Le Bon had planned on writing and recording her sixth album somewhere far from her own backyard, seeking inspiration in the unfamiliar. ![]() ![]() The Welsh artist’s 2019 album Reward came from a period living alone in England’s Lake District, and the result was her most creatively ambitious, satisfyingly idiosyncratic set of songs to date, born of what seemed at the time like a unique set of circumstances. Cate Le Bon might be the exception, if only because she went through it before. It refocuses our attention, changes our routines and perhaps obliterates them entirely, but often at some psychological cost-some do better than others in hermetic solitude, but it never feels quite right to say anyone thrives. There are countless lessons to be learned from the past couple years, most universal among them being that isolation for extended periods of time can damage a person’s well being.
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