Cate Le Bon shares new song ‘Typical Love’
Welsh indie folk icon Cate Le Bon released her wonderfully wonky art pop LP Pompeii earlier this year. Filled to the brim with synthesizers, strings, and stirring vocals, Pompeii is certainly one of the better albums to be released this year. And like any good artist, Le Bon had some material that didn’t quite find its way onto the album.
Today, we’re to hear one of those tracks that didn’t make it onto Pompeii: ‘Typical Love’. The track is only an “outtake” as a formality: there’s nothing cast off or lesser than about ‘Typical Love’, a buzzy and mechanical take on the idiosyncrasies of sharing your heart with someone else. Sometimes it hits, and sometimes it hurts: typical love, right?
“‘Typical Love’ was a product of a rare jam session with dearest genius friend, Stella Mozgawa,” Le Bon said in a statement. “The outline, written on bass along to one of Stella’s infectious grooves, was taken into the Pompeii sessions where I disassembled and reassembled it many times but it always felt like a second cousin to the other tracks so was put aside for a rainy day.”
I can see why ‘Typical Love’ wasn’t included on Pompeii, an album so meticulous and perfectly planned that there’s no room for any fat. ‘Typical Love’ is a solid jam, but also more sparse and spare than the rest of the songs on the album. It’s a solid track, but Le Bon is probably right when she felt like the song wasn’t quite the right fit for what became Pompeii.
Lucky us, though, that we get to hear the song now. Not unlike the industrial wasteland of Mitski’s Laurel Hell, ‘Typical Love’ takes zoning out and turns it into an art form. Every time the dippy titular phrase comes rounding back into the arrangement, there’s always something new and fresh to cull from it.
Check out the video for ‘Typical Love’ down below.
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