Primavera Sound 2019: Homeshake + Cate Le Bon

She moved from Wales to Los Angeles, but damned/blessed be the roaming, Cate Le Bon’s phone keeps ringing all the time. Back in the days, her collaboration was required by Gruff Rhys, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Manic Street Preachers; today Kevin Morby, Deerhunter and Tim Presley (both of them made up the project DRINKS) have her number on speed dial. Where there’s smoke, there is a fire. In other words; there must be something about Cate Timothy if everybody wants her in their studio. In this case, though, the mystery is easily solved. Pick any of her songs with dada lyrics, composition criteria that do not follow cause-effect logics, a voice that travels through the doors of perception… and you will enter both her reality –her career is as solid as a Templar fortress– and those many other realities that, if she wishes to, she can conjure up.

The fact that Peter Sagar was Mac DeMarco’s guitarist until 2013 is starting to be purely anecdotal. Ok, yes there were a couple of cassettes with low quality trappings and one or two demos that kept him lethargically in bed, but that interminable hangover in a stuffy room is over. With "Fresh Air" (2017), the Canadian musician opens the windows wide open, shakes out the sheets and… wow, surprise! This doesn’t sound like DeMarco or like any other scruffy imitator on the guitar. In fact, there are no guitars here, but elastic synthesisers, thrift store drum machines and toy keyboards. The artist flirts with synth-pop, chillwave and R&B. Helium-inflected voices that are desperate after several days of nonstop partying. Choruses that are so catchy that they make it easier to face a new day. At last, some fresh air.