Cate Le Bon, Mexican Summer, 2022

It’s like trying to run through syrup in your dreams— heady basslines and drunken horns lazily sway in and out of harmony, then the steady rhythm guitar makes the bed on which Cate Le Bon’s angelic vocals dream. “Dirt on the Bed” is Pompeii’s first track, setting a moody, hazy tone for the rest of the Welsh musician’s latest album, released on February 4th, 2022. 

The opening track plunges underwater, its aquatic bassline like refracted sunlight through the water’s surface in a dreamlike world, a submerged utopia.

Many of Le Bon’s lyrics in Pompeii seem to reflect upon her own viewpoints as a vocalist and producer recording her sixth solo album. She muses, “Sound doesn’t go away/ In habitual silence/ It reinvents the surface/ Of everything you touch.”

Little did she know that she was also reinventing the surface of her music recording process: the COVID-19 pandemic was in full force, and her music did not go untouched.

As British COVID restrictions became stricter, Le Bon realized she would be forced to record Pompeii in Cardiff, stuck in a cramped house which she had called home fifteen years prior. She was far from where she hoped to immerse herself: Joshua Tree, and the isolation of the Californian desert’s very own habitual silence.

Le Bon recalls that “writing for the album became its own kind of escapism – almost like a version of Dadaism.”

A sector of modernism, the absurdist art movement known as Dadaism looked to make sense of the unthinkable. It was heavily influenced by the first World War and invited viewers of art to participate in art, hoping to cultivate a new sense of self as a society banded together in the face of great tragedy.

Moving through the album with Le Bon and her silky vocals, the effervescent world of Pompeii truly does come to life. It is an exploration in all bittersweet feelings: an array of emotions encapsulated by swaying melodies and widely reaching lyrics.

“Every fear that I have

I send it to Pompeii”

Cate Le Bon, “Pompeii”

In the wake of the pandemic, Le Bon seems to be reaching for the same comforts, using her own music as a way to define her contrasting feelings of hope and despair. 

Similarly dancing between livelihood and lethargy, the album’s powerful basslines stand out as the backbone of the record.

Like another form of escapism, the musician describes the grounding quality of bass: “There’s something meditative about the repetitive nature of bass riffs, and so the genesis of the whole record was my love for playing bass.”

Le Bon wrote the basslines first, and built the rest of the tracks off of them. They serve as a guide to the dissonant groove of Pompeii, an anchor for her slow and psychedelic indie pop sound.

“French Boys,” the free-floating third track, flows smoothly into the titular track, but Le Bon’s familiar sound shifts as the album unfolds. Akin to riding a circus carousel, the melodies of “Pompeii” twist and warp as the song unfolds, ending like a dizzying walk through the funhouse mirrors. 

This shift in Le Bon’s sound is more than welcome. Amidst her own self-protection, Le Bon declares “I can’t put my finger on it/ I want to cry, I’m out of my mind ” on second track “Moderation.” She rawly bares her confusion, but also her will to persevere.

Through curating her own sense of escapism, like the Dadaists, Cate Le Bon strongly delivered a shiny, shimmering, and stunning sixth album. Pompeii is a testament to the strength of the artist, an unexpected diary spilling all the secrets of our fluctuating souls. 

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