"Le
Bon's days as a farmgirl in West Wales may be long behind her, but she's
clearly held on to certain agricultural principles: namely, that the right
amounts of patience and nurturing can produce glorious yields." Pitchfork
“How would I describe the album?” muses
Cate Le Bon. “Cut a remote island in two and place one half to your ear…”
Cate Le Bon, the Cardiff-based singer who popped up on Gruff Rhys’s Neon Neon album before issuing her own debut album, My Oh My, in 2010, returns with her second album, CYRK, in April 2012. It follows Le Bon’s extensive tour with St Vincent in the USA, where the album has already been released too much acclaim and Cate is currently on her own headlining jaunt.
“CYRK is like a time travel travelogue which continually returns the sea,” says Le Bon, who took the album’s title from the Polish word for Circus and took inspiration from a trip to the Isle Of Eigg. “I mostly write about the sea, matters of the heart and animals – or a mish-mash of all three.”
Recorded with producer Krissie Jenkins in Cardiff and set for release on Gruff Rhys’s Ovni imprint, CYRK found Le Bon raiding Super Furry Animals’s collection of synths, pedals and guitars. “We spent days plugging different things into one another – it was so much fun,” she says.
Players include Le Bon’s “trusty” backing band (Andy Fung on drums, Steve Black on bass and Niwl’s Sion Glyn on guitar) plus H. Hawkline on synths and Meilyr and Gwion from Racehorses playing brass on Great. “If you listen very carefully,” says Le Bon, “you can hear Gruff Rhys wailing backing vocals on Falcon Eyed too.”
The completed album is a 35-minute blast of colour, ever-changing as it whizzes from the garage pop opener Falcon Eyed to piano-led Puts Me To Work and the psychedelic title track. Elsewhere, the delights of Fold The Cloth, The Man I Wanted (“The only time that I have put a recorder track down and not been ridiculed for it. Result.”), the proggy Through The Mill and closing number Ploughing Out, a track so epic it demanded to be split into two parts. “The song ends with a cacophony of instruments, a mixture of everything that has appeared on the album,” says Le Bon. “It's the finale. I make my saxophone debut; it will also be the last time I ever play saxophone. I very nearly ruptured my cheeks.”