Alexis Petridis 

Caribou – Our Love review: spellbindingly ambiguous, endlessly fascinating electronica

Alexis Petridis: Dan Snaith reckons his latest Caribou album is mind-numbingly simple – but that does a great disservice to this beautifully strange, subtle music
  
  

Caribou aka Dan Snaith
One of the things that makes this music so compelling is its ambiguity, the feeling that you’re never quite sure where it stands … Dan Snaith aka Caribou. Photograph: PR

Dan Snaith has described his seventh album as both “mind-numbingly simple” and “something for everybody to listen to”. These are phrases almost guaranteed to give his fanbase pause: over the course of his career – first under the name Manitoba, then as Caribou – Snaith has never previously given the impression of being terribly interested in mass appeal. An expat Canadian, he started out making complex laptop electronica that variously referenced British psychedelia, bedsit singer-songwriters, the output of Warp records, krautrock and shoegazing indie. The fact that he did it while studying for a doctorate in pure mathematics at Imperial College London sealed his image as an austere, cerebral figure, even by the standards of laptop electronica producers – not a subsection of the popular music world renowned for its outrageous flamboyance. He scored his first record deal while working at Hewlett Packard’s research facility in Bristol. A teetotaler, he professed to while away time on tour by inviting people on to his bus to give him and his backing band “guest lectures” on topics including the transistor radio and Marxism. If you look online, you can find his thesis: “Chenevier defines overconvergent p-adic automorphic forms on any twisted form of GLn/Q compact at infinity chomologically by embedding classically constructed irreducible representations of GLn/(Qp) in certain infinite dimensional p-adic Banach spaces,” it opens, but, be warned, it’s not all as straightforward and easy for the layman to grasp as that.

As his music gradually shifted its focus from the bedsit to the nightclub, Snaith defined it in opposition to the dance mainstream. Last year, he put out a collection of the DJ-friendly productions and remixes he’d been releasing to vast acclaim under the name Daphni: a track like Ye-Ye already had a proven track record of moving dancefloors, but Snaith insisted it was music for “a small world where dance music lives up to its potential to liberate, surprise and innovate”. It was nothing to do with “the mind-numbing predictability of the EDM barfsplosion currently gripping the corporate ravesters,” he added, presumably for the benefit of anyone tending to get an anonymous-looking Canadian with a doctorate in overconvergent Siegel modular symbols confused with Skrillex.

And yet, here he is, blithely announcing that his new album has been inspired by hearing that Caribou’s 2010 track Sun was big in Ibiza. In fairness, there’s a sense in which you can see what he means. You could just about imagine his collaboration with vocalist Jessy Lanza, Second Chance, becoming a breakout hit from this new album, albeit in an alternate universe where radio programmers and music buyers alike are unbothered by the fact that the synthesisers in the background keep swaying out of tune with the lovely melody to unsettling effect. Elsewhere, the album draws on the same areas of musical history that have inspired chartbound dance acts in recent years. You can hear echoes of old deep house tracks in the warm textures of All I Need, while the chopped-up and looped snatches of vocal recall UK garage, and the title track features a mid-section that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early-90s hardcore record and a synth part that’s fairly obviously a homage to Inner City’s 1988 classic Good Life.

But while artists such as Disclosure alight on the pop aspects of their source material, Snaith is audibly interested in subtlety and uncertainty. For all his perfect grasp of the kind of dynamic shifts that cause pandemonium on dancefloors – the sudden flurries of euphoric strings on the title track, or the moment, three minutes into Can’t Do Without You, when the whole track is consumed by fizzing electronics – there’s something spellbindingly ambiguous about the music on Our Love, heightened by the fact that Snaith foregrounds his own vocals, which are fragile and introverted: he often sounds like a man singing to himself. Can’t Do Without You starts out as a profession of undying love, but as it progresses, the vocals become increasingly wreathed in echo, the bassline distorts, the track becomes more and more overcrowded with sound, and you’re struck by the sense that the undying love in question might be a little obsessive and creepy. The relentless percussive battery of the instrumental Mars gives every impression of heading to some kind of ecstatic climax, but the big drum roll is followed by an unexpected drop in temperature: it suddenly sounds brooding and chilly. The closing Our Love Will Set You Free has all the ingredients of a euphoric anthem – a gorgeous melody, a nagging hook, more strings, snatches of funk guitar, a suitably uplifting sentiment in the chorus – but the whole thing feels strange and sickly: the sound is thin and it phases in and out, as if it’s being played off an old, damaged cassette.

You leave Our Love a little baffled as to how Snaith came to the conclusion that this was “mind-numbingly simple” music: if it’s not complicated in the overconvergent Siegel modular symbols sense, one of the things that makes it so compelling is its ambiguity – the feeling that you’re never quite sure where it stands. That may doom it as “something for everyone to listen to”. A glance at the Top 40 suggests that what people currently want is something straightforward, and Our Love is anything but. This is rich, strange, endlessly fascinating music: a subtle, beautiful triumph.

 

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