I love Cate Le Bon’s lyrics: the whimsical ambivalence, the deadpan, the sighs. Take “Miami,” which opens her 2019 record Reward:
Decorate your own discord, Miami
Never be the same again, no way
Falling skies that people uphold, move with me
Love neglected by reward, okay
“Miami” is an invitation to occupy dissonance, to be at home within the impasses under hallway ceilings; to adorn discord onto the world and to attach rhythm to collapsing optimisms. But this last line drops the imperative mode: does “reward” speak to the neglect of love or is reward itself that which does the neglecting? To reward someone for love is to provide a receipt for it. I reward my lover when I aim to extinguish desire by presuming to be able to satisfy it.
“Okay” meets reward with deadpan, sitting somewhere between the breathless declaration of love and the realization that the person to whom I wish to declare my love isn’t there (cf. "Daylight Matters"). It’s the “okay” of someone who’s walked alongside love running on its own fumes. It expresses a detachment that remains within a scene, which acknowledges impasse without blinding itself to the fact that emergency hasn’t yet arrived.
Stones and dirt recur with some regularity in Le Bon’s lyrics. One of my favorite songs from 2017’s Crab Day, “I was born on the wrong day”, carries itself with a lighthearted militancy:
Oh, teach me words like faith
Put all your details in the ground
As if you don’t believe in stones
I’m gonna cry in your mouth
As if you don’t believe in stones! I love the wry aggression in these lines, the cuttingness of these tears that could just as easily be the death-driven matricidal piss of the Kleinian child betrayed by their “good” objects. The song, it turns out, was written in reference to Le Bon’s birthday being celebrated on the wrong day for the first six years of her life, a revelation all the more shattering for how it undermines the reliability of our parents to provide us with a reference point of certainty: “when you’re six years old you think that it’s the end of the world when you’re told that your birthday is a different one from the one you thought.”
Pompeii is at some remove from the earlier albums’ preoccupation with pressing things into stones (or mugs, or chairs): “I’ve pushed love through the hourglass,” she sings on the title track, “Did you see me putting pain in a stone?” The album opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” likens love to sound, describing it as something that allows you to “reach without watching / the switches on the wall,” and which “reinvents the surface / of everything you touch.” The song recalls another from Crab Day, “Find Me,” in which the narrator haunts their lover’s home when they aren’t there, “glossing all your dirty furniture” and leaving handprints on the windows. Now the narrator themself is dirt, accumulating on the bed, stuck “on repeat / without a function.” There’s an observation being made here about sublimation: we may only be able to get so far in squeezing things in or out of stones, but it’s in the process of our attempts to do so they accumulate as sand, dirt, and dust, reinventing surfaces.
The image of bodies covered in ashes haunts the lilting synthpop of “Harbour.” When she introduced the song in Chicago on Valentine’s Day, she dedicated it to “the lovers” in the audience (“you’re supposed to say these kinds of things on Valentine’s Day”). In a gloss of the song, though, she’s said that the lyrics are about asking what one does in their final moment of being alive: “‘What do you do in your final moment? What is your final gesture? Where do you run when you know there’s no point running?’” This is the love as compulsion to repeat, to return to the “harbour” of the lover’s embrace, perhaps against your better judgment (“Into your arms / And I’m like a child”). Such compulsions and fallings speak, too, to the ways love and death have of bending time back upon itself, to the interchangeability of “life” and “night” and of days and minutes and memories and centuries: “What you said was nice / when you said my face turned a memory / […] when you said my heart broke a century.”
In the album’s final track, “Wheel,” the narrator bitterly reflects on a lover’s resistance to being taught “how to want a life” (“it takes more time than you’d tender”). But the song doesn’t leave us with the feeling of bitterness or depressive stultification as much as an ambivalent mixture of world-weariness and steadfastness:
I could resign to the opulence
Of abstract optimistic love
Raise a glass in a season of ash
And pour it over me
Love, like art, isn’t a romance but a work: it accumulates, like ash, rather than being captured by reward; it shifts the landscapes of worlds by reinventing their surfaces. This is the voice of someone who has survived love without forgetting its violence and hurt, but whose commitment to staying in its fray remains intact.