Name: Reward
Brand: Cate Le Bon

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

4923125023

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2019-05-24

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Redeye

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

184923125023

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Total Cap

1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

LP-MEX-250

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Black

Black Vinyl housed in Gatefold Sleeve.

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184923125016

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1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

Artist

Cate Le Bon

Genre US

Rock-Pop

Label US

Mexican Summer

Albums of the Year 2019 Top 100

Welsh singer-songwriter, born 4 March 1983 in Penboyr, Carmarthenshire, Wales.

How do you define a label whose roster defy definition indefinitely? Jessica Pratt, Connan Mockasin, Ariel Pink, Oneohtrix Point Never, Cate Le Bon and Washed Out. Over the past ten years, Mexican Summer have signed a sprawl of artists and it is almost impossible to draw a line of best fit. Almost.

The common denominator amongst the menagerie is a conceptual spirit that explores, subverts and evolves a monumental array of pop music genres. Whether it’s Connan Mockasin’s psychedelic dream soul, Weyes Blood’s Laurel Canyon pastiche or whatever the fuck Oneohtrix Point Never is, Mexican Summer are drawn to those who play with our preconceptions.

Beginning in Brooklyn in 2008, Mexican Summer was founded by Keith Abrahamsson and Andres Santo Domingo. It is now the foremost experimental pop label and a bastion for artists to take creative control of their output. You never know what Mexican Summer will put out next, but you know it will take you to a place that is instantly recognisable and alien all at once.

First off, congratulations on reaching your 10 year anniversary last year. What are your hopes for decade number 2?

Thank ya, kindly. Decade #2 has gotta go even deeper, right? Our hope is to continue supporting artists who bring beautiful art and positivity into this big, frequently bleak world of ours.

As an outside observer, there is something elusive that connects your artists. A kind of conceptual indie-rock or epic experimental pop. Could you shed any more light on what it is that you look for in your artists?

Good songs + good people - but always keepin it freaky. If that criteria is met, we’ll usually find a way to figure out the rest.

Could you name us five releases over the past 11 years that define Mexican Summer?

Not sure about defining us, but here’s SIX selects I dig (cause I like even numbers better):

Ariel Pink - Dedicated To Bobby Jameson

Weyes Blood - Front Row Seat To Earth

What has Mexican Summer got in store for us in 2019?

2019 is almost a wrap, so here’s some 2020 news… new music from Ariel, Connan, Dungen, Paint, Jess Williamson, Arp and a bunch of new signings, reissues and book projects that you’ll have to wait a minute or two to hear about.

After the brief but beautiful collaboration between Ariel Pink and Weyes Blood, who from your roster would you love to see team up for a record?

That collab (and others like it) have been the fruits of our ongoing residency series that we hold each April in Marfa, TX at our Myths festival. We have a new one on the way this Fall from Cate Le Bon + Bradford Cox and then next year from Drugdealer + Tim Presley. Hoping we can keep that spirit alive and kickin well into the future…

Mexican Summer Label Focus

Back In Stock

Rough Trade Albums of the Year 2019 No. 7

See also Albums of the Year Exclusive EP <a href="https://www.roughtrade.com/us/cate-le-bon/here-it-comes-again">Here It Comes Again</a>

New album from Cate Le Bon called Reward via Mexican Summer available here on Limited Red Vinyl, Black Vinyl and CD.

It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned — for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.

This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential studio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District.

Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick — Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars — and were added to the album, “one by one, one on one”. The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon’s previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a relatively drastic change in approach.

Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster.

The multifaceted nature of Le Bon’s art — its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious — is evident right down to the album’s very name. “People hear the word ‘reward’ and they think that it’s a positive word” says Le Bon, “and to me it’s quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it’s really indicative of the times we’re living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning.” The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: “Always keep your hand behind the chisel.”

LP - Black Vinyl housed in Gatefold Sleeve.

LP+ - Limited Red Vinyl housed in Gatefold Sleeve.

Reward

Music US

Buy Cate Le Bon - Reward (Vinyl, CD) now from Rough Trade - independent purveyors of great music, since 1976.