There’s something unique about being in the audience at a Cate Le Bon gig, like you’re getting a short, sharp shock of excellence that’s almost too cool to look at directly. With a look that could stop hearts, frighteningly impressive vocals and an intricate understanding of the full range of possibilities that her overdriven electric guitar possesses, she has an innate ability to leave you and your eardrums more than a little bit affected.
Playing in front of a packed Cardiff crowd at Clwb Ifor Bach, Cate mixed up an avant garde, psych and folk rock concoction of epic proportions that everyone in the audience will probably look back on memorably. The term “wall of noise” has been used a lot since Spector pioneered it back in the sixties, but it’s definitely true of Le Bon live as she channels the musical legacies of The Velvet Underground, Kate Bush and Led Zeppelin to bring the music production formula to life in her gigs.
The only real downside for us is that it came to an end all too quickly, and while that’s probably a good thing for our now fragile eardrums, it left us with a big taste for more. The problem is that despite the fact that Cate’s been around on the music scene since around 2007, she’s only got a few albums to draw her set list from – 2009’s Me Oh My, 2012’s Cyrk and 2013’s Mug Museum. Luckily, they’re amazing albums, but it does cut down the options for an extended gig.
Cate and the band blitzed out a fair few of the tracks from the first and third albums, bringing everything to a meteoric mid-point roar for the super freak out ending on Wild from Mug Museum. While the entire set was pretty impressive, highlights included the brilliant Hollow Tree House Hounds, Are You With Me Now, I Can’t Help You, Cuckoo Through The Walls and Terror Of The Man.
No God was the incarnation of folk rock perfection, Duke sounded big live without losing its little alt-pop gem framework, and Sisters was the slightly deranged, avant garde tale that it is in the recorded version. In addition to the blasting power of Cate Le Bon’s guiter, there’s also a lot of psych-organ to add to the off-kilter sound of the night along with the kind of drum beats that wouldn’t feel out of place at a Maureen Tucker practice session in 1965.
However, there’s a slight downside to being the coolest girl in rock when it comes to the glory of the encore, when a little of the cool has been sort of absorbed by the crowd and they suddenly become a bit too laid-back to shout too much for more, which for a homecoming gig, the last in Wales in fact for the rest of the year, isn’t quite right. Either this is expected behavior or Cate was planning on doing an encore no matter what, as she returned to the stage and was greeted with a much more significant wave of excitement.
For us, the encore didn’t work quite work as well as the main part of the gig, as it was pretty much made up of a short solo sung poem and a cover that just didn’t sound as good as her own music. From our point of view, Cate’s about five or six songs away from having a perfect headliner set-list and while she’s already up on the last time we saw her at The Lexington back in 2010, we’re already looking forward to the next; by which time she will probably have finished up recording her fourth album in LA and we’ll have more than enough songs to save Hollow Tree House Hounds, Duke and something new for the second coming of nights like these.
