ALBUM: Cate Le Bon – ‘Pompeii’

You awake, eyes wild, dreams of Pompeii still flashing through your mind. It’s dark outside, what time is it? A rhythm shuffles over the horizon, an unidentified pulse of percussion and a shambling couple of wind instruments. Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth album, has begun, with ‘Dirt on the Bed’.

Yet again, she has created a remarkable, singular work. Pompeii is continuously rewarding, an album to return to again and again until it swallows you into its world. Like its artwork, a version of the Tim Presley painting that served as the central inspiration for the entire project, it possesses an aged, grainy feel in spite of its fresh originality. The sound is science fiction. As if from a parallel 80s, it is drenched in synths while evading the worn conventions of synth pop, instead assimilating those sounds into the Cate Le Bon style.

The brilliant ‘French Boys’ is punctuated by a beautiful steel pan hook that is mechanical and melancholy, creaking with the sad nostalgia of an abandoned oil rig in some post-apocalyptic landscape. Later tunes like the momentous ‘Cry Me Old Trouble’ develop walls of synths that provide epic and strange backdrops to the lyrics, complementing their tone perfectly.

Le Bon’s writing builds on the vocabulary of the ancient and the spiritual which she introduced to her work on her previous album, Reward. It constitutes perhaps the best example to date of her ability to create affecting lyrics out of abstract emotive language. Lines like “cry me old trouble”, “my heart broke a century”, “raise a glass in a season of ash and pour it over me”, they have that Symbolist combination of familiarity and mystery. Like a dream, her writing makes some unconscious sense even when individual elements evade comprehension.

Recent Cate Le Bon albums have felt terrestrial in their experimentation, each album conveying a kind of landscape. Crab Day was shingly, coastal, Reward was mountainous and sublime. By comparison, this album feels like it takes place on a swampy exoplanet, with thicker air and a slightly stronger gravitational force. In other words, Cate Le Bon has broken loose from Earth and is operating from a world of her own, free from any obvious external reference point and working according only to her original logic.

The closer, ‘Wheel’, provides a cyclical end to the album, an approximate reprise of ‘Dirt on the Bed’ with a palette expanded on the basis of all that we’ve gained through the 9-song track list. Only Le Bon can bound this sound-world, can make sense of it and condense it into an ordered and beautiful album. She is yet to make a bad record, and this might well be her finest work yet.

Order your copy of Cate Le Bon’s new album Pompeii here (released 4th February)

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Photo Credit: Cate Le Bon

Lloyd Bolton
@franklloydwleft
@lloyd_bolton

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ALBUM: Los Bitchos – ‘Let the Festivities Begin!’

The first week of February. The deepest depths of winter. The coldest time of the year. A couple of weeks on from ‘Blue Monday,’ supposedly the most depressing day of the year. What better time to release an album full of summer party bangers? Enter Los Bitchos, wielding their debut record Let the Festivities Begin!, a bumper pack of the pan-continental band’s signature swashbuckling, psych-swirling instrumentals – the sound of the festival you are already impatiently looking forward to.

This is an album dedicated to joy. It is full of irresistible grooves and winding guitar lines and occasionally punctuated by yells of triumph overheard at the end of takes. The guitar line on ‘Pista (Great Start)’ is almost physically tangible, reaching out of the speaker to tickle your spine. Other tunes, particularly ‘Tropico’, move with the synth pulse and go-ahead danceability of a Tom Tom Club record. Half the song names sound like the captions of polaroids from a summer holiday – especially ‘Lindsay Goes to Mykonos’ and ‘Try the Circle!’ – a feeling heightened by the sunny flange guitars that lead most tunes. The group seem to stand for escape to faraway climes, from their pseudo-Spanish name through to the evident inspiration they’ve drawn from the music of warmer countries, from Turkish and Australian psych to Argentinian cumbia.

With Let the Festivities Begin!, Los Bitchos herald the arrival of summer with an album to thaw your soul. It’s playful and modestly epic, encapsulating the infectious spirit that has led the group to be one of the best loved acts on the scene.

Los Bitchos’ new album Let The Festivities Begin! will be released on 4th February.

Follow Los Bitchos on bandcamp, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram & Facebook

Photo Credit: Tom Mitchell

Lloyd Bolton
@lloyd_bolton

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ALBUM: Shoun Shoun – ‘Monsters & Heroes’

Truly exemplifying the do-it-yourself band ethos, Bristol-based four-piece Shoun Shoun (‘shoon-shoon’) have released their debut LP of genre-defying noise, Monsters & Heroes – a fuzz-drenched, lo-fi excursion into don’t-give-a-fuck art-punk experiments.

Following the release of their 2019 EP A Hundred Trips – five tracks of dreamy garage rock – lead vocalist and guitarist Annette Berlin began working with an uncontrollable urge to connect with music. Finding intimacy with sound during a time when the UK was in lockdown, a result of the continuing global pandemic, Berlin fought isolation with creativity. The result is Monsters & Heroes, a record that rewards repeat spins on the turntable.

Opening with Giuseppe La Rezza’s crashing drum assault and Berlin’s distorted guitar grunge, ‘Did I Play Games’ disorients the listener with its loud-soft-loud dynamic, a juxtaposition of propulsive rhythm and delicate psychedelia recounting that one occasion a friend drunkenly slept on Berlin’s kitchen floor: “Just let me lie here with nothing to do / As long as I lie here everything will wait.” Next, the highly danceable punk groove of ‘Much Sweeter’ enters the chaotic spirit of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, before Shoun Shoun lowers the tempo for the monotone ‘Sway with Me’, Berlin’s evocative lyrics swaying in ethereal feedback – “Feel your way through time and space.”

Recorded in a garage and mixed in a loft, the frustration of lockdown is captured perfectly by Berlin on ‘Stuck’, a pandemic prompted coping mechanism. Her loneliness is confronted by infectious basslines courtesy of Berlin’s neighbour and literal garage rock guitar, whilst ‘Follow Me’ rumbles with a slow burn of unpredictable melody. Boris Ming’s abrasive violin strings stand out amongst a cacophony of idiosyncratic instrumentation, whilst Berlin delivers a vocal performance eerily similar to Björk, pre-The Sugarcubes.

Psych-monstrosity ‘Toxic’ allows for eccentric synth experimentation from Ming, who instinctively lets loose across a scuzzy bassline from Ole Rudd, before the mood shifts into the uplifting poppy alt-rocker, ‘My Daughter’. The lysergic wail of the violin pierces through the hauntingly atmospheric Nick Cave-like soundscape of ‘Refresh & Replay’ before Berlin shifts language for album closer, ‘Schwing Mit Mir’ (or Swing With Me), a droning melody building towards a crescendo of Deutschpunk.

Monsters & Heroes is a fractured collection of songs, reflecting a fractured period of time; two years of emptiness defied by experimental ingenuity. Ignoring genre conventions, Shoun Shoun have crafted complex noise that is uniquely their own, delivering an infectious lockdown long play without compromise.

Follow Shoun Shoun on bandcamp, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram & Facebook

Ken Wynne
@Ken_Wynne

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LISTEN: Fe Salomon – ‘Super Human’ and ‘Wired On Caffeine’

A rousing alt-pop tune that shimmers with self-belief, songwriter Fe Salomon has shared her latest single ‘Super Human’. Co-written with composer and long-term collaborator Johnny Parry, the track embraces the binary opposites of the human condition via playful beats, jazzy arrangements and Salomon’s smooth vocals.

Taken form her debut album Living Rooms, which is set for release later this year, Salomon has channelled her love of performing and her eclectic range of influences into her new records, which aims to tell the stories of “multiple lives lived and lost in the city, of friendships that meant everything and the characters you’ll never meet again, of transience and loneliness, and of getting by and moving on.”

‘Super Human’ is the first offering from her new material, and it’s an exploration of the power of the alter ego. “‘Super Human’ originated with dancing around with some upper body shimmy moves,” Salomon explains, “then a chunky brass section, dirty synth and disjunctive rhythms, all inspired by a number 70’s and 80’s movie soundtracks.” Accompanied by a cinematic video directed by Fraser Taylor, the visuals show Salomon performing the shimmy shakes that inspired the track’s conception.

The single is also accompanied by a bonus track ‘Wired On Caffeine‘ which showcases Salomon’s shadowy alt-pop side. Stepping into the shoes of an artist sacked from a job before it even began, Salomon remarks: “The chaos became very still and the seed of a new journey popped out its first green shoots of hope. Finding yourself is sometimes just a question of optics. ‘Wired on Caffeine’ is what happened when I looked through that lens.”

Watch the video for ‘Super Human’ below and listen to ‘Wired On Caffeine’ here.

 

Follow Fe Salomon on bandcamp, Spotify, Facebook & Instagram

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut

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