Album Review: Cate Le Bon - 'Pompeii'

There are pandemic albums that capture the uncanny quietness of lockdown: the boredom, the isolation, the never-ending Zoom calls. And there are records such as Cate Le Bon’s Pompeii, which reach further and attempt to engage with the low-rising dread that has seized the world across the past two years.

The Welsh artist’s sixth LP is suffused with disquiet – a sensibility conveyed through ominous swells of saxophone and songs that brim with angst. It’s heavy listening but never in a way that is off-putting, with Le Bon working her way towards a troubled chorus on ‘Running Away’, and doing battle with a baroque bass-line on ‘Moderation’.

Le Bon has described Pompeii as a thought experiment in which she “sought permission to annihilate identity” and to wonder, as the citizens of Pompeii did, how one might occupy one’s final moments if the world was about to come to a violent end.

The answers she comes up with are not comforting. Pompeii is not a project that pats you on the back and tells you everything is going to be fine. It is dark, sometimes delirious and every time Le Bon’s gothic voice sweeps through or another saxophone arrives, like a bitter wind, the apprehension intensifies. Yet the anxiety is restorative rather than off-putting.

The message is that we are not alone in what we’ve experienced and, while things could get better or worse, at least we’re all suffering through these uncertainties together.

Listen: ‘Moderation’

Out now via mexican summer: