Cyrk

iTunes Review

With Cate Le Bon’s sophomore album, the Welsh chanteuse approximates the vintage vinyl in her record collection with songs that collage old tones and artful psychedelia alongside an abstract take on baroque pop. The quirky, analog-scrambled “Falcon Eyed” opens like Nico singing for The United States of America. Muted vocals coo reservedly over pre-punk rhythms as a hypnotic mantra of Moog tones keep up with the pace of a Velvet Underground–derived guitar jangle. It sounds like source inspiration for Stereolab and Broadcast—bands that came before Le Bon. Her equally demure approach to “Puts Me to Work” is matched by antiquated parlor piano, but here the grit and grime of those VU influences gets wrapped in a comforting, pastoral Welsh blanket that has more in common with 2001’s The Blue Trees by Gorky's Zygotic Mynci (also from Wales). In the angular title track, the vintage guitars play through dirty and distorted fuzz. Le Bon finds her voice in “Fold the Cloth,” where her fetching falsetto soars over what sounds like an outtake from Dungen’s Ta Det Lugnt.