New Track: Find The Somber Side Of Quirky In 'Home To You' By Cate Le Bon
Tristan Young @talltristan
Let’s go with something mellow and contemplative for this sleepy Vancouver day. Something from Cate Le Bon’s new album, Reward, should do nicely. Her track ‘Home To You’ is a great example of her leaning into her stranger indulgences, yielding muted pop music with a surprisingly robust personality. Le Bon sings with a classical dignity, the edges of her phrases contoured by hints of resignation and saturnine temperament. It adds a sense of isolation and detachment tangled with unfulfilled desire. This is not to say the song itself is an entirely solemn affair, but rather she compartmentalizes the more spritely parts of her personality and offers them through her music. Curious piano streams push forward with an interminable sense of confidence. It sounds a bit like Julia Holter only less abstract and more maroon tinged basement lounge. Her lyrics aim for a waypoint between the tonal dissonance of her voice and the music- it largely works. Her idea of home is at once, “a neighbourhood in a kitchen”, and an, “atrocity in the town”. Depending on where she lands on the spectrum she finishes her words with velvety trails or elongated and ornate howls. Le Bon suggests that this precarious balance is unsustainable by the end. The gorgeous outro sequence is a repetition of, “last time for all time gone”, with a somber resoluteness, drained of hope but not energy. The sense of comforting normalcy she hints at in ‘Home To You’ is replaced with disconnection. From what exactly, is a bit of a mystery, but that’s why you revisit the song.