Cate Le Bon w/ Mega Bog

945 King Ave,Columbus OH 43212

12 February, 2022

Description

Cate Le Bon w/ Mega Bog Presented by Archie Fox Live ALL AGES Cate le Bon Mega Bog Inspired, idiosyncratic Art Rock of the highest order. Strutting playfully, surreally alongside such visionaries as Bowie and Byrne. Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch. To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii‘s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii‘s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja’s encouraging presence. As Deerhunter's Bradford Cox aptly notes about Le Bon, “there are artists who look inwards or outwards, and then there are the very rare ones who transcend either location.” Cate le Bon Mega Bog