ALBUM REVIEW: Cate Le Bon – Pompeii

Mexican Summer

Released: 04.02.22

Throughout her career, Cate Le Bon has always had a gift for blurring the lines between the oblique and the obvious, between the impulsively chaotic and the cold-headedly pre-determined. These juxtaposing (yet never clashing) qualities come to the forefront of Pompeii, an elusive art pop meditation on emotional devastation that also doubles up as the most purely pleasurable album she’s released yet.

Doubling down on the smoother, purposefully misremembered eighties soundscape of Reward, where wiry guitars duel with billowing synth pads and saxophones roams the perimeters, songs like the elegantly bruised Harbour, the cryptic revelations of the title track and the genuinely brilliant Remembering Me feel like the thrilling, emotionally resonant culmination of Le Bon’s artistic project to date.