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CARIBOU
Honey(Merge Records)
Add date: 10.8.2024
Release date: 10.4.2024
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Over more than two decades Dan Snaith has had many guises. Snaith arrived with 2001’s Start Breaking My Heart as an artist with an impeccable ear for melody and a sound years ahead of its time. Album two, 2003’s Up In Flames, eschewed Start Breaking My Heart’s minimalism in favour of all-out otherworldly energy and riotous ecstatic sound.
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Over more than two decades Dan Snaith has had many guises. Snaith arrived with 2001’s Start Breaking My Heart as an artist with an impeccable ear for melody and a sound years ahead of its time. Album two, 2003’s Up In Flames, eschewed Start Breaking My Heart’s minimalism in favour of all-out otherworldly energy and riotous ecstatic sound.
The Milk of Human Kindness is the first time we really saw the man behind the music. Part reflective, campfire-comedown, part rampage of sonic discovery, revelling in motion; it also had a newfound emotional depth and range, an undeniable beating heart that would come to define Caribou. 2007’s Polaris Prize winning Andorra took this one step further, bringing Snaith’s tentative voice to centre stage, singing for the first time on every track. Though starting to embrace his central role, Andorra’s horizons spanned the globe in search of giddy escapism marking an album that felt less solitary than ever.
2010’s Swim (Resident Advisor and Mixmag’s ‘Album of the Year’) saw another about turn. Where Andorra was undoubtedly on-the-road, Swim saw Snaith returning to his London home. Taking influence from a now historic period in the London dance music scene and specifically many nights spent at the legendary Plastic People; Snaith bottled a palpable sense of excitement and inspiration. Technically staggering in its crisp, clean richness, Swim perfectly captured the warmth and dizzy enthusiasm that Snaith was feeling at the time. It was ultimately a record that made Snaith’s own contribution to the scene that inspired him as “Sun”– his first truly classic track – continues to delight dancefloors and festival stages worldwide.
Throughout all this change, the Caribou live band remained remarkably consistent. The immaculate core band we now know and love hit their groove early and ran with it. Having now played over 1000 shows on five continents the band has enraptured dingy basements and huge arenas, opened and closed festivals and had a global audience in raptures. Apart from swelling at one point to the mammoth 15-person line up (including Kieran Hebden, James Holden and Marshall Allen) of the Caribou Vibration Ensemble for a handful of shows, this lineup has remained constant, a rare example of a live band that just works right from the start.
While on the road, mammoth 7.5-hour long Caribou DJ sets also gave birth to yet another Snaith moniker, Daphni. Feeding off the immediate energy of dropping tracks in the moment and watching crowds go wild, Daphni became a home for less laboured over productions from Snaith. Following the release of Swim came Daphni’s JIAOLONG. A shape shifting collection of dancefloor heaters composed of pure feeling and an encyclopaedic, expansive knowledge of dance music; while Caribou crossed over, Daphni - now with two more albums and an iconic entry into the FabricLive series - has kept a toe well and truly in Snaith’s roots in sweaty clubs and festival corners.
2014’s Grammy-nominated Our Love bottled this whirlwind live activity and took it into Snaiths newly built basement studio for a display of the impeccable production prowess that had long been building in his music. A record for which Snaith took the most hallmark of concepts “love” and applied it with such genuine warmth and honesty to his listeners, his collaborators and those close to him that it became impossible to resist. His voice now the confident core of the music, it was a breakthrough, one of those rare, undeniable records that defines an era. Cemented by a legendary BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (‘Essential Mix of the Year’), you couldn’t go to a festival during that time without hearing its singles “Our Love” and “Can’t Do Without You” spilling out across joyful crowds, often you still can’t.
How to follow this up then? With another about turn. It took his longest ever break of six years and over 900 draft ideas but in 2020 Snaith returned with Suddenly ("Perfectly imperfect pop" 5/5 The Guardian ‘Album of the Week’), a record that eschewed Our Love’s luxurious, warm swells for quick chop-change bursts of creativity. Surprising and exciting snapshots that revealed more about Snaith and his own personal life than we’d ever seen. Suddenly offered Caribou’s trademark positivity but this time in places where that might be harder to find, a tool both for dancefloors and for personal healing.
All this leads to Honey and an intriguing new kind of Caribou record. After putting every ounce of himself into Our Love and Suddenly, for his sixth Caribou album Snaith now pulls himself away a little in search of music that isn’t about any one person and is available to everybody. As Daphni has continued to grow as an entity it also draws those two personas closer together than ever before. Snaith fuses their strengths into a record that grabs you and moves you like Daphni, before cradling and uplifting you like Caribou. Huge dancefloor tracks twinkle, shimmer and surprise in a way only Snaith’s productions can but with a freshness that defines an artist who is too excited by music-making to ever truly settle into any one sound. In the words of Snaith himself:
“One thing that hasn’t changed for me from the very beginning is a manic curiosity of seeing what I can make out of sound. Not so much what someone can make out of sound - a ‘professional’ with a host of collaborators and resources at their disposal, but me.. in my little basement studio. There’s more equipment in here than there used to be but essentially it’s the same as ever: still chasing that thrill of when something hits really hard and I find myself jumping up and down or the hairs standing up on my arms in excitement. How lucky am I that that’s never gone away? That the chance of making something new and exciting is still as exhilarating as ever. And as much fun as ever. Starting the day with nothing and (finishing most days with nothing good but occasionally…) having something that didn’t exist before stuck in my head by the end of the day. It still seems like a kind of alchemy.”
In amongst Snaith’s own voice, one other key thing that marks out some moments on Honey (for example “Broke My Heart”, “Come Find Me”, “Do Without You”) is a new technical playground for Snaith, one that fits perfectly with this approach to a record that’s less about him. In his words again:
“The word ‘alchemy’ kind of captures something about this I think actually — obviously one of the big things that changed while making this album was the ability to manipulate my voice using AI. I found it impossible to resist trying it. And once I’d tried it, it was impossible to look away… I have such a limited vocal range and style. Over the years I’ve managed to find ways of making it work, of making feel at home in the music I make. But what about being able to change it completely? What could that do? What possibilities are opened up by that? Well… actually not change it completely. I think the central thing that drew me to using this technology on this album was that if I listened closely, I could still hear myself in there when I tried on different voices using AI. It still captures all the phrasing, the pitch imperfections, the delivery, the breath… even when turning it into someone else’s voice. It sounds both very much not like me… but also like me. I tried these tracks out on my closest friends and asked ‘Who do you think is singing?’ and always they guessed someone close to me (my daughter for example) or that it was me with some kind of effect on it. Why? Because it is some kind of alchemy - changing my voice into something that is both mine and not mine.”
In this way what emerges is a record that is at once Caribou and not Caribou, Daphni and not Daphni, Snaith and not Snaith. There’s no question when you hear it as to who is at the centre, nor would you want that removed. Even what’s different is familiar, because that’s how it has always been. There’s never been a Caribou record that sounds like the last, so change here is just as comforting as constant. They say expect the unexpected and you’ll never be surprised; well there’s plenty here to be surprised by, but then with a Caribou record you’d never expect anything less.