LIKE THE MARY POPPINS of experimental guitar pop, Cate Le Bon becomes a fantastic arbiter of the surreal on her newest record, Crab Day.
While Mug Museum, the Welsh singer's nostalgia-hued, psych-folk album from 2013, felt grounded in retrospective thought, Crab Day cuts the gravity and hosts a floating tea party. Here, Le Bon playfully juggles sounds and often-nonsensical concepts to illustrate the invariable relativity of everything. Nothing is how it appears on Crab Day, and she seems to relish this whimsical, persistent state of unknowing. It's simultaneously mournful and joyous, riding on waves of chaos instead of resisting them.
The album takes its name from her niece's imagined holiday: "She must've been about four at the time, and was completely baffled by this notion of April Fools' Day," Le Bon says. "She just decided it was Crab Day and spent the whole day drawing crustaceans with different hairdos."