“Everything in moderation” is as good a motto as any. To live in moderation requires a number of qualities all of us can agree are admirable: patience, restraint, frugality, responsibility, discipline, and so on. Moderation doesn’t just mean cutting back on drinking or fast food, either: it can mean having a healthy mix of activities so you stay a well-rounded individual. Above all, moderation is a sign of emotional maturity; in this world of instant gratification and retail therapy, it takes strength to keep yourself grounded and balanced in life.
And yet, actually living in moderation is an exercise in frustration and denial. Wanting something and not being able to have it makes the lizard part of the brain vibrate with anger, and some of us can only resist the siren call of “life’s too short!” for so long. Humans have struggled with this for ages, and the internet has only made it harder. Here, you have access to more information than a million Libraries of Alexandria, you can get virtually anything delivered to your doorstep in days, and you can spend your entire life falling down one obsessive internet rabbit hole after another. It’s now easier than ever to amuse yourself to death, and even with the recent supply chain issues there are no shortage of options.
Based on what we’ve heard from her upcoming album Pompeii, Cate Le Bon seems to be preoccupied with similar thoughts. From the first two singles, Pompeii will be an album about the price we pay for the wonders of our modern age. On the excellent “Running Away,” we’re granted instant connection on a global scale, but that means we can’t escape the avalanche of crises and tragedies our phones cheerfully dump on us every day. The second single, “Moderation,” is about how the titular virtue has become a lost art, something none of us think we’ll miss until it’s too late.
Le Bon usually takes an indirect, sometimes obscure approach to songwriting, but the chorus of “Moderation” is considerably more direct than usual. “Moderation/I can’t have it/I don’t want it/I want to touch it,” Le Bon sings, like a mission statement for the modern hedonist. With its louche groove and smears of Kaputt-adjacent saxophones, “Moderation” brings to mind 80s sophisti-pop; as with the best examples of that genre, the sounds are luxurious, but that luxury is subverted by an understated longing for something more.
Bands like Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile made rich, expensive-sounding music that mirrored the unbridled consumerism of the Reagan-Thatcher era, but the music was often lonely and heartsick. To quote the name of a group that started life as sophisti-pop, they had everything but the girl. Le Bon doesn’t sound like she’s longing for somebody so much as something—anything to make her content and fulfilled. But until then, she remains stranded at “the party where [she’s] standing on the modern age,” getting everything she wants and nothing that she needs.
