“Rock Pool”

For all their freeform noise, Cate Le Bon’s songs have pure hearts. Neither the rock canon nor concrete villains exist in the Welsh punk’s charming, surrealist world, which she assembles by scrambling signifiers and imbuing them with more emotion than most deconstructionists ever manage. Halfway through “Rock Pool,” from a new EP collecting off-cuts from this year’s sublime Crab Day, she poses a question so guileless that it makes a mockery out of 2016. “Bins on fire,” she sings coolly, her voice cascading like a miniature waterfall in a rock garden. “What’s the occasion?” Le Bon arrives at a disaster scene and mistakes the flames for celebration—or maybe “Rock Pool” is set in some distant future, where the warm flames of hell have become their own source of comfort.

For Le Bon, nonsense is the only way to maintain sanity in a senseless world. There’s every chance the rest of the song—mentioning division, “the latest thought for relay,” and myopic living circumstances—is a comment on The Bubble that nobody dares escape. But searching for meaning seems secondary to her strangely comforting caper. One guitar squawks; the other barks. The bass and shaky percussion shuffle along gamely, marshaled by Le Bon’s sage fairytale voice. She’s like Snow White leading a pack of singing songbirds through the forest, except there’s twigs in her hair and the birds are balding and snaggletoothed. As a vision of innocence in a year so wretched that the phrase “dumpster fire” was rendered meaningless, it’s hard to beat.