Rascals, Bangor
2 March 2010
For a supposed “Land of Song”, Wales has thrown up surprisingly few truly great musical mavericks over the years. Sure there’s been John Cale and David R. Edwards, and maybe Gruff Rhys and Brian Lustmord but that’s about it. It may then raise an eyebrow or two that despite her scant handful of releases to date, I wouldn’t hesitate to add relative newcomer Cate le Bon to that exclusive club.
I was taken by complete surprise last year when Le Bon followed up her lovely but largely conventional psych-folk 10” EP Edrych yn Llygaid Ceffyl Benthyg with a remarkable debut album, Me Oh My. Its haunting songs avoided categorisation and elevated the album to my favourite and most played release of 2009 – and a serious contender for best of the decade. Having seen and increasingly enjoyed her in various support slots over the past few years, I was excited to find Cate le Bon was playing a headline gig in a small upstairs room in my home town as part of a short Welsh tour, warming up for her imminent American debut trip.
Support act Y Niwl are almost certainly the first ever Welsh-language surf instrumental band and play with an infectious vigour and knowing authenticity that takes even the most ardent euromodernist back to his high school senior prom. Y Niwl remind you just what a good idea The Ventures, Dick Dale and Link Wray were in the first place, and may well be the best live dance combo in the country at the moment… I’ll most certainly be booking them for my graduation party come 1963!
Cate le Bon’s versatile four piece combo shares one member with Y Niwl – guitarist Siôn Glyn, a combined Sterling Morrison and Roger McGuinn of the Welsh music scene who has previously sprinkled his understated guitar magic on the likes of Topper and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and here provides the perfect foil to Cate’s idiosyncratic compositions, alongside a drummer and bass player who are both adept at switching instruments to suit the needs of a particular song. Cate herself flits between keyboards and acoustic and electric guitars with a detachment simultaneously awkward and otherworldly.
Sonically akin to how the Velvet Underground might have sounded had Nico held on long enough to front their third album, the group build fittingly brooding and earthy settings for Cate’s unsettling song-play – imagine Syd Barrett gender-reassigned as Angela Carter …or even vice versa. Her disquieting worldview is captured beautifully on the great “Hollow Trees House Hounds” video that comes as a bonus in the special Rough Trade Shops edition of the album (but which can be found on YouTube).
The songs set off familiarity against experiment in as finely balanced a way as The Faust Tapes or The Modern Dance, constantly shifting perspective to avoid being pinned down. “Shoeing the Bones” grooves along like Neil Young circa Harvest with Cate’s country-blues picking underpinning her plaintive lament that ‘These are hard times to fall in love’ while “Hollow Trees House Hounds” rocks to an almost Ron Wood-style Faces/Stones riff, yet whenever things threaten to get comfortable, up springs a disorientating wall of guitar dissonance or a totally off-kilter keyboard line to throw everything up in the air and see where it lands. All the while, ingenious songwriting prowess is complemented by a striking mastery of vocal phrasing that leaves the listener hanging on every syllable and imbues even the most abstract lines with a profound authority.
The set climaxes (pre-encore) with “Terror of the Man,” a feast of foreboding anchored by a ponderous prog riff worthy of Van Der Graaf Generator. Way heavier than the album version, this is a great set closer that gains more weight with each performance. Cate le Bon might not become a household name – she’s far too interesting for that – but I would put money that in twenty years time, she will be lauded and anthologised in the latest rewriting of rock history. Let’s just hope she gets the chance to make lots more wonderful music between now and then.
-Alan Holmes-
