There may be no more concrete proof of Cate Le Bon’s stature than Noel Gallagher’s appearance on Later… With Jools Holland last October. Tucked in the back left of the stage, barely visible behind Gallagher’s groovy boys giving it their best Slade impression, stood a kind of Fake Le Bon: a woman sporting an exact replica of the Welsh guitarist’s old pudding-bowl haircut, plus the kind of cloak that she’s often flourished in videos and on stage. This austere figure also appeared to be playing a pair of scissors, and evidently represented Gallagher attempting to signpost his experimental streak amid the brawny 70s stomp. It was funny to see a fairly leftfield artist’s essence boiled down to aesthetic shorthand – especially since it’s an image that the wild Welsh guitarist has long since abandoned.
Le Bon used to make lightly psychedelic pop that turned and resolved as satisfyingly as a Swiss cuckoo clock. But after weathering the stresses of money and critical opinion that followed 2013’s gorgeous Mug Museum, she decided to recalibrate her approach: “Music is supposed to be fun,” she told the Guardian. “It’s easy to forget that.” Now living in LA, she formed duo Drinks with Tim Presley, a one-time Fall member and power-pop innovator operating under the mantle of White Fence, a mutating outfit known for its collaborations with one-man cottage industry Ty Segall. The pair took inspiration from Soul Jazz’s pre-punk compilation Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing as Society, stripped away their respective heavenly ways with melody and got primitive on debut Hermits on Holiday: gnarled guitar motifs squawked like menacing birdsong, while strange insider jokes wove in and out of music that was intermittently funky and freeform.
The liberating experience rubbed off on both parties: Le Bon’s next solo album, 2016’s fantastic Crab Day, was more dissonant and less linear than her past records, the lyrics full of muddled senses (“love is not love when it’s a coat hanger”) and broken emotional connections. She produced Presley’s The Wink, which shaved off his shaggier tendencies for a nervy high-wire act full of strange blooms of warmth and wit. To fans of post-punk and “psych”, whatever that means these days, Le Bon and Presley’s productions should be a playful, inventive tonic to genres that often come off as exercises in who has the best fancy dress box (an ongoing battle between Starcrawler and the Lemon Twigs).
Until now, the duo’s various collaborations haven’t always fully communicated their obvious ease with one another, their intimacy occasionally peeping through pockets of cryptic skronk. But their second album is genuinely a case of hermits on holiday: the pair spent a month living in a crumbling house in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort (hence the title) in the south of France, swimming in rivers, dodging scorpions, drinking beer in deserted town squares and making an album at their leisure. It opens, on Blue from the Dark, with the kind of spindly Spanish guitar that might twang across one of these squares – a light, lulling melody that underpins their earnest harmonies and fades into the sound of children’s voices and backyard play.
Hippo Lite is more atmospheric and relaxed than the duo’s recent combined releases, but this is largely a red herring: we’re nowhere near Cliff’s Summer Holiday. Instead, field recordings of croaking frogs and squeaking doors give the album its inviting sense of place, along with a lyrical scheme that’s mostly nonsense, but nonetheless conveys better than any postcard the peculiar sensations of being in an idyll far from home: “If you see me in a dream / Pedalling at half the time / Liquid spaces come in between”, they sing on Pink Or Die, capturing the strange dissolution of time in foreign climes. “Antihista, antihista!” they yelp on Leave the Lights On, as if scrabbling around for salve after a hornet sting.
It is a fairly bizarre album, but an absorbing and clever one that gets stranger as it goes on. The ornate, cascading piano melodies in Corner Shops demand a microscope to see exactly how they’re knitted together, while Real Outside uses a needling guitar and the kind of lurching violin last heard on the Raincoats’ debut album to create a strange, ritualistic two-step that suggests the rules of some lost game. The closest the pair come to conventional intimacy is Greasing Up, which sounds as though they’ve unravelled a local folk song. In the later years of Presley and Le Bon’s careers, Hippo Lite probably won’t be regarded as a major event, but when every aspect of an artist’s career is monetised, and album promotion cycles seem more like personality cults, it’s this casual approach to creativity that makes it so appealing. Anyone can cut their hair and wield a pair of scissors, but Drinks’ sensibility is much harder to bottle.
