Le Bon’s dad played the guitar and made mix tapes. “It was, ‘We’ll see you when it gets dark.’ We each had a goat we’d walk.” The girls got into horseback riding, too-“two muddy kids on two muddy ponies.” Le Bon’s sister became a veterinarian, married a horse surgeon, and now lives with her husband and children in Penboyr. “My parents would kick my older sister and I out on the weekends, and we’d roam the countryside,” Le Bon told me. They bought a dilapidated farmhouse, worked for the local government, and raised their daughters in the rustic style. Her parents had met at university, in Newcastle, England, and then moved to Penboyr, a hamlet in the west of Wales. Le Bon spent much of her early life in exhilarating communion with nature. “That beautiful remoteness is kind of what I crave,” Le Bon said, of living in Joshua Tree. But now we’re living at a time when everything is catching up with us.” One song on the album, “Moderation,” had been partly inspired by “The Moon,” a 1958 essay by the modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi, which explores, Le Bon said, the “chasm between human needs and technological progress.” The song was about “the guilt or existential dread” that we feel about behavior we can’t seem to alter, even to save the planet. People captured in their final moments.” More recently, it had brought to mind other environmental catastrophes, “and the way we try to palm off tragedies or qualify them in ways that mean we’re safe. “I was always struck by the idea of someone’s final gestures-something so private-turned into something so public and permanent. “I remember first hearing about it in primary school,” she said. I asked what the lost city of Pompeii meant to her. Le Bon told me that she usually thought of an album’s title long before recording it. Heba Kadry, the Brooklyn-based mastering engineer who worked on the album, told me that she’d been delighted when she first listened to the recordings-“all these amazing, New Wave-y kinds of sounds, way more synth-heavy than Cate’s earlier albums, but also still minimal, sharp, architectural.” Kadry said the tracks were so fully realized that she felt a “beautiful kind of pressure not to fuck them up.” But the music often has an up-tempo eighties vibe, with whining, Eno-esque guitars in “Remembering Me,” lashings of synthesizer and saxophone, and a head-nodding danceability throughout. The result, Le Bon’s sixth solo album, wades into bleak themes-loss, memory, legacy, the destruction of the planet. In the mornings, the three housemates cheered themselves up, Le Bon said, by “commuting”-leaving, making a big loop, and coming home with coffee to start the workday. (The drummer Stella Mozgawa joined via Zoom from Australia, adding her tracks to Le Bon’s guitar, bass, piano, and vocals.) From the upstairs windows, Le Bon could see seagulls wheeling through the gray winter sky. Le Bon had spent time there in her twenties, and she was joined by her romantic partner, the musician Tim Presley of White Fence, and her co-producer Samur Khouja. Le Bon’s was mostly recorded on a residential street in Cardiff, Wales, in a terrace house lent to her by her friend Gruff Rhys, of the Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals. “Pompeii” is one of a wave of albums made by artists in various iterations of isolation. “What you said was nice, when you said my heart broke a century.” Much of the time, I have no idea what Le Bon is singing about, but find myself moved anyway. “What you said was nice, when you said my face turned a memory,” she sings on “Harbour,” from the new album. And then there are her lyrics-enigmatic, aphoristic, packed with oddly juxtaposed concrete images, like a Dadaist collage. In the videos for her captivating new album, “Pompeii,” she strikes theatrical poses, unsmiling, in a color wheel of eccentric costumes, some of which encase her like carapaces. She sings in a slightly detached voice, punctuated by occasional, inscrutable sighs. Le Bon was born in Wales in 1983, and lived there until 2013, when she moved first to Los Angeles, and then, in 2021, to Joshua Tree, in the Mojave Desert. She sometimes repeats a word or phrase until it sounds uncanny. She will write a lovely melody, then thread it through patches of dissonance. The music of Cate Le Bon, the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, has a rigorous, art-school weirdness that can be both entrancing and estranging.
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