The horizon line is always crooked in a Cate Le Bon song, and while her music has been leaning that way for more than a decade now, the Welsh songwriter can’t stop bringing her lopsided worldview into tighter focus, improving the real world along the way. Through commitment and refinement, her weirdo-prim rock songs have come to feel quaint, and meticulous, and capable of impossible things, like little still-life paintings where the fruit keeps rolling off the table.
Written and recorded during the pandemic, Le Bon’s sixth album, “Pompeii,” isn’t couched in catastrophe so much as the quiet, distant, vestigial memory of one. Using wiggly guitars, glassy keys, seesaw horns and the strange waxiness of her own voice, (think: David Bowie’s sophistication, David Byrne’s quirk, Nico’s sang-froid), she knows how to make her music wobble without ever allowing it to collapse. But just to play it safe, the very first thing Le Bon sings on this album is a forthright incantation to help everyone keep their balance: “Trust in love.”
From there, she goes tilting toward new mystery zones, and by the time she reaches the refrain of “Harbour,” she’s showing us how a lucid voice can transform an ambiguous lyric into a riddle: “What you said was nice when you said my heart broke a century.” Fabulous line. What could it mean? The drums are locked in an easy rhythm here, giving us time to mull the possibilities, but then the horns start bleating in weird places and Le Bon decides to warp and curl her melodies in pantomime. Listening with body and mind feels not unlike puzzling over the meaning of love during a low-impact aerobics class at sea.
The horns come and go throughout these songs, but they exert serious influence on everything else. As a singer, Le Bon clearly has her role models, but she ultimately sounds more interested in how air moves through a shape than doing hero karaoke. Meantime, her guitars and synths often aspire to airy, smeary, hornlike communication, and even the drums, for all their tidiness, consistently speak in umphs and hisses. It’s as if this music is trying to breathe itself to life — especially during “Remembering Me,” a song where Le Bon muses on the idea of legacy maintenance in a tone that almost resembles urgency. “In the remake of my life I moved in straight lines,” she sings. “My hair was beautiful.”
That superb twist of thought turns the title of this album into a dark, funny, timely joke: Before “Pompeii” can be remembered, it must be experienced.
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