Cate Le Bon Hits an Avant-Pop Peak

Since she began making records in the early 2010s, Welsh-born, California-based Cate Le Bon has staked out her own unique avant-pop space, especially on excellent recent albums like 2019’s Reward and 2022’s Pompeii. Her warmly stentorian singing and dreamy lyrics can have a de-centering effect, so her music often gets called “surreal” or “dada” — one critic described it as “anti-mimetic.” But Le Bon’s records aren’t good because they’re strange, they’re good because they’re good, melodically rich and well-crafted, full of musical invention and personal urgency. It’s exactly what you might expect from an artist who once named Big Star’s sad-hearted classic Third and Pavement’s most emotionally up-front LP, Brighten the Corners, alongside hip touchstones like Faust, Bill Fay, and Serge Gainsbourg in a list of her favorite albums. Along the way, she’s also become a go-to producer and studio collaborator for artists from Wilco to St. Vincent, further deepening her stamp on the last few years of indie music.

Her latest is the most beguiling LP she’s made, and arguably her most deeply felt. Singing amid filtered guitar, echoing saxophone, and circular drumming, she makes minimal yet richly textured music that can evoke David Bowie’s Berlin era, the Cocteau Twins, or John Cale, a lodestar influence on Le Bon who lends his vocals to the glacially lovely “Ride.” (“It’s my last ride,” the octogenarian Velvet Underground co-founder notes candidly.)

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The music flows with a nice distracted elegance. “Mothers of Riches” has a forlorn danceability, while “Body as a River” makes a keyboard drone feel almost hymnlike. Impressionistic lyrics would fit this stuff, but Le Bon pokes the spacious haze with direct evocations of love and heartbreak. “Gently read my name/Cry and find me here/I’m eating rocks,” she sings on the album-opening “Jerome,” her voice quavering as she adds “there’s nothing you can hope for.” The angst-ridden yet sublimely pretty “Love Unrehearsed” finds Le Bon torn between harsh jealousy and faint hope: “Can you set her on fire/And come down the well with me, babe,” she offers. “About Time” opens with watery guitar that brings to mind late-Eighties Wire and turns into an almost breezy tune spiked with hurt when she sings, “I’m not lying in a bed you made.”

Intense as that might be, vulnerable ambiguity is a key component here, too. The beautiful highlight “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)” turns on the phrase “I thought about your mother/I hope she knew I loved her,” while “Pieces of My Heart” widens the lens, as it seems to sum up an immigrant’s moral dilemma when she sings, “I pledged my love to America/Then I run so far.” Talk about a lyric for our time. It’s just one of many moments where this alluringly opaque record becomes yearningly universal.

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