Cate Le Bon has cut an imperious figure across her three solo albums. Her strong Welsh accent puts her at a curious remove, and she allows the guitars and organs that shape her songs to thrash, but only within strictly drawn boundaries, like Television riffs remade as repeating patterns. Her music has the sense of being just so, which seems to be in her nature: 2013's Mug Museum governed memory as a clearly labeled archive.
Le Bon moved to L.A. to make that album, enlisting White Fence touring member Nick Murray on drums. Two years later, she's teamed up with his bandmate Tim Presley as DRINKS, a collaboration (that they'd rather bill as a four-legged solo project) born of a lot of time spent "playing guitar and laughing manically at each other." Rather than merge their respective psych sensibilities, they've stripped away the pop fabric—White Fence's dusky harmonies, Le Bon's delicate organ refrains—to muck around in primitive territory, recasting themselves as outsiders.
As consummate musicians and students of pop, Le Bon and Presley aren't able to revert to Shaggs-like naivete, but they're able to suspend their aesthetes' sensibility in order to embrace chaos, even silliness. There's unmistakable precedent to the sound where they meet, the dub inflections and buzzing guitar welts. Hermits evokes the captivating disconnect of a late-'70s John Peel show, where the Slits and Delta 5 segued into Strictly Personal-era Beefheart's blues-pop abstractions—you half expect to hear Ivor Cutler pop up to recite a poem in between tracks.
Opener "Laying Down the Rock" is a bit of a red herring. It's the most formed song here, a shaggy but highly strung garage plodder that doesn't shine with the wonder of discovery. “Focus on the Street”, though, begins a process of stretching rock's fabric loose. The verse runs on an insistent buzzsaw riff and clipped vocal incantations, the picture of no-wave austerity. Where the duo should break into some kind of lambasting, art-damaged chorus, they drift into hairy freeform guitar, like hippies pranking a White Columns crowd. "Cannon Mouth" sounds like Le Bon impersonating Nico through a snorkel; "She Walks So Fast" remakes Faust's "Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxième Tableaux" as splayed British post-punk, Presley yelping "rock'n'roll!" amidst the burly twang.
True to its creation, humor courses through Hermits, and rescues a few outlandish moments. "Tim, Do I Like That Dog" is almost seven minutes of Le Bon repeatedly asking Presley just that, bringing levity to the frankly hard-going music: strangled guitar scribble that thins to a single piercing note. The few audible lyrics that leap out elsewhere are funny, too, if completely inscrutable. The title track sounds like a reedy cuckoo clock, and marks times such as "Six past the eight—copulate." A glance at the muddled liner notes makes it seem like "Cannon Mouth" could be a song about austerity politics, privilege, and protest ("If you don't know what I'm on about/ Then you'll never want to scream and shout"), but Le Bon and Presley never make anything obvious. Only "Cheerio" veers too far into the unknown, stranding the listener among shrill proto-synth explorations.
Most of Hermits on Holiday is pretty spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares. An interviewer recently asked Le Bon and Presley whether they intended Hermits to be a psych album. "I don't even know what those words mean anymore," Le Bon replied. Instead, the pair play like kids trying to light a fire with sticks and flint: there's a distant possibility something might take, but really it's all about the thrill of scrubbing around in the dirt.
