Cate Le Bon’s album Pompeii has puzzle-like pleasures

Cate Le Bon’s new album was made in a familiar place where she wasn’t meant to be. The Welsh singer-songwriter lives in California but wrote and recorded Pompeii in her old home city of Cardiff after getting marooned there during the first 2020 lockdown. Having arrived from Iceland, where she had been producing an album for fellow indie freethinker John Grant, she found herself back in a house from when she was starting out as a musician. Like the cyclical but wonky motions of her songs, she had taken an askew route back to her beginnings.

Her roots lie in the quirky fringes of Welsh indie music from the 2000s, an edge-of-the-radar scene of freak-folk and psych-rock acts. Raised as Cate Timothy, she chose her stage name in jokey reference to Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon. Listen closely to Pompeii’s “French Boys” and you can detect a very distant echo of her 1980s namesake hollering “The Wild Boys”. Whereas the original Le Bon cried the title of the Duran Duran hit with unabashed desire for the big time, the other Le Bon — who was born in 1983, a year before “The Wild Boys” came out — recites the title of her song in a seesawing high voice. She comes across as stylised and inscrutable.

Championed early in her recording career by Gruff Rhys of Cardiff mavericks Super Furry Animals, Le Bon has always had an auteur-like sensibility. “Well, I like what I like and I like what I know,” she sang on her first album, 2009’s Me Oh My, picking her way deliberately through the words. The gently psychedelic spirit of her first releases has acquired a firmer form over time. Like mechanical contraptions, her songs unfold to jerkily repetitive movements. Surrealist lyrics and unusual arrangements give them an unpredictable course. Rather than being pointedly subversive, the results tend to be playful — although less so on Pompeii.

Co-produced with her regular collaborator Samur Khouja, this is her sixth solo album. Le Bon plays most of the instruments, accompanied by saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood and Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint on drums. Opening track “Dirt on the Bed” opens with a clanking beat and a sax making short back and forth phrases, like a rusty sign swinging in an abandoned town. Le Bon breathes in and out rhythmically, and then starts singing oblique verses about repetition as a condition of life. We are all “recycling air”, she suggests. Like the guitars scratching away in its background, the song digs for general truths from the lockdown context in which it was made.

Time recurs as a theme. The weight of the past presses down on “Moderation” and “Cry Me Old Trouble”. “I’ve pushed love through the hourglass,” she sings in the title track, which ends with the tick-tock of the organ associated with love: “It’s my heart, it’s the beating of my heart.” Pompeii refers to a historical place preserved at the moment of its destruction, a riddling scenario that fits with the puzzle-like pleasures of Le Bon’s songwriting. Although the enjoyableness proves less consistent than her previous solo album, Reward, the best moments are top quality. “Running Away” is the highlight, a track about feeling overwhelmed set to a charming bass groove and swooning saxophone riffs redolent of David Bowie or Roxy Music.

★★★☆☆

‘Pompeii’ is released by Mexican Summer