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.
Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon’s studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged.
Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever.
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The title of Mega Bog’s newest album Dolphine—her fifth, and first for Paradise of Bachelors—is inspired by a myth that suggests that, as humankind evolved from sea creatures, some individuals chose not to leave the water and walk the earth, but rather to stay in the ocean and explore the darkness as dolphins. (The extra ‘e’ was added to take the word out of the everyday, translating it into a potential futuristic dialect.) Dolphine is an album for the swimming human shadow obscured by waves. The songwriting was inspired by Erin’s own swim through a myriad of overwhelming emotions, including the ongoing mourning following the death of her childhood horse companion Rose, her navigation of the feelings and physicality of two abortions, and the hapless and shattering social, political, and environmental turmoil on the planet known as Earth.
In October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians. Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. In addition to Birgy (vocals, guitar, piano), the lineup included Meg Duffy (guitar), Matt Bachmann (bass), Derek Baron (drums), James Krivchenia (engineering, percussion, effects), Aaron Otheim(synthesizers, piano), and Ash Rickli (guitar and vocals). Later, Will Murdoch (clarinet, synthesizers) and Zach Burba (synthesizers, bass) offered their own atmospheric overdubs from their home on the West Coast. Over the next year, Erin added to the tapestry with vocal contributions by Nick Hakim and Kalen Remy Walther, upright bass by Benjamin Murphy, textural guitar by Austin Jackson, and saxophone by Jeff Tobias, until she had successfully excavated each cold mystery with proper care and wonder. The completed sound is thick and inviting. Bellowing, breathless vocals, mystical lyrics with the presence of poetry and the intuitive logic of dreams, and promiscuous, sometimes dissonant chord structures swirl together, coalescing into hazy and hypnotic fantasies.
"Carried by gentle rhythms, glowing synth pads, jazzy guitar licks, trilling flutes, and astral crescendos, it sounds something like the “energize” effect on “Star Trek” as transposed for a jazz band." Pitchfork
"Erin Elizabeth Birgy has spent ten years under the guise of the intriguingly ambiguous moniker Mega Bog, which raises almost as many questions as her music. On her fifth record, titled Dolphine, Birgy navigates personal and anthropological trauma on a soundscape that is musically luscious, disruptive, and superbly unsettling." Loud and Quiet