Introduction

START BREAKING MY HEART (2001)
1) Dundas, Ontario; 2) People Eating Fruit; 3) Mammals Vs. Reptiles; 4) Brandon; 5) Children Play Well Together; 6) Lemon Yoghourt; 7) James' Second Haircut; 8) Schedules & Fares; 9) Paul's Birthday; 10) Happy Ending.
I know relatively little about the thing called «jazztronica» or «nu jazz», but if the most typical artists in that style happen to be Amon Tobin and Flying Lotus, whose works are quite familiar to me, then I'm happy to say that on this album, Mr. Dan Snaith, a 23-year old artist hailing from Dundas, Ontario who used to call himself Manitoba before cruel life forced him to change this to Caribou — anyway, on this album Mr. Dan «Manitoba» Snaith sort of invents his own subgenre of jazztronica, which we might just as well call «kiddie-jazztronica».
Yes, he would go on to far more accessible and seriously different things, but he did start out as a self-made electronic composer, and one with a vision all his own, even if that vision remains on a scale so humble that «nice and pretty» is probably the strongest reaction that may be honestly ex­perienced when listening to this stuff. Snaith's primary tool throughout is a softly tuned, warbled synthesizer — producing muffled, Fender Rhodes-like electric piano sounds, as well as various chiming textures, so that the entire record has a bright, sunshine-like feel, enhanced by occasional usage of equally soft and calm acoustic guitars and harps; as for percussion, he is normally con­tent to stick to the most «primitive» of drum machines, often imitating jazzy brush technique or Indian tablas, and sometimes probably sampling Snaith's own drumming.
If all of this were played as «normal» jazz, the album would hardly hold any interest for anybody; it is the astute combination of analog and digital elements that makes it what it is — a series of impressionistic musical paintings that combine jazzy vivaciousness with friendly hi-tech and a certain childish innocence. The whole thing is a hustle-bustle, but one that seems to take place right under your nose, without any attempts to separate the background from the foreground or create additional sonic depth through echoes, tricky mixing, and rich layers of overdubs. What you have is simple, loud, but inobtrusive melodies — playful and careless in tone, but not alto­gether insubstantial. Why they should necessarily be associated with Canada (the first track is ʽDundas, Ontarioʼ — Snaith's homeland) remains somewhat of a mystery, as does the album's title, because there is absolutely nothing heartbreaking about the music: but chalk it up to the necessity of the Artistic Enigma, quite forgivable in the face of the overall loveliness of the sound anyway, and let us just evaluate the music on its own terms, regardless of whatever the artist wants, because now it is out of his hands anyway.
So, in this alternate unreal reality, ʽDundas, Ontarioʼ is a place symbolized by several meditative «electric piano» lines criss-crossed with a toe-tappy xylophone part — two voices, one pensive and intimate, another one playful and arrogant, a Florestan and a Eusebius of sorts. This trick is later reprised in different varieties — for instance, the interplay between the somewhat dreary, continuous keyboard parts and the jumpy folksy acoustic guitars of ʽChildren Play Wellʼ, or the dreamy psychedelic synths and the jerky jazzy bassline of ʽSchedules & Faresʼ — and provides the bulk of sheer entertainment. In any case, this is a very active record: there is not a single track that would not have a lively rhythmic base or at least a second, dynamic, voice that stands out in stark con­trast to the more ambient/static loops of the first one.
The most active track is ʽLemon Yoghourtʼ, which somebody on RYM aptly called "a great track to jerk off to", not because it has the word "lemon" in it, but because the music itself does sound like it invites you to, ahem, «squeeze your lemon» for about two minutes, with a very insistent multi-channel keyboard loop that might just sound like the speedy dripping of lemon juice, but who knows... anyway, sexual innuendos aside, it's a fun sound, and the track is quite strategically placed at the middle of the album, guaranteed to wake you up if you accidentally fall asleep on one of the longer tracks, like ʽPeople Eating Fruitʼ (which does not at all sound like people eating fruit, unless you take all the crackly glitching in the background to be symbolic of gnashing teeth and suckling lips — but it does sound like a joyful morning prayer-ritual conducted by a bunch of shiny happy people who probably do eat a lot of fruit).
Longest of all is ʽPaul's Birthdayʼ, a track that could probably act like a perfect sampler for the rest of the album, because it's got it all — a cute combo between digital and analog (there's a nice harp glissando acting as the track's main hook), all of the man's beloved synth tones, jazzy bass­lines and bits of modal brass soloing, and even a surprisingly funky arrangement of digital glit­ches replacing the bass groove for a period of time. I have no idea who the heck is Paul, but I do know that he got himself a fairly unique birthday present here.
The closest vocal analogy to this record would probably be something like contemporary Broad­cast albums, but even those would either have more «depth» or more «grief» to them — the ad­vantage of Start Breaking My Heart is its total and complete cuddliness, which never gets sickening due to the technical mastery of the artist, and provides you with yet another charming advertisement for the paradisiac qualities of Canada (an imaginary Canada, one should always add before the charmed listener actually starts packing). There might not be enough memorable melodic themes here to assert compositional greatness, but the overall sound of the record, once you let it seep in, is unforgettable, and definitely deserving its thumbs up.
UP IN FLAMES (2003)
1) I've Lived On A Dirt Road All My Life; 2) Skunks; 3) Hendrix With KO: 4) Jacknuggeted; 5) Why The Long Face; 6) Bijoux; 7) Twins; 8) Kid You'll Move Mountains; 9) Crayon; 10) Every Time She Turns Round It's Her Birthday; 11*) Cherrybomb; 12*) Silver Splinters; 13*) Olé; 14*) Thistles And Felt; 15*) Seaweed; 16*) Cherry­bomb Part II.
Ambition begins to bubble here — Manitoba's second album is even louder and more colorful than the first, and goes on to spread its tentacles in even more directions. By 2003, Dan Snaith had staked his claim somewhere midway between Sufjan Stevens and The Animal Collective, although I would guess that the major influence on Up In Flames was neither, but rather an older artist — My Bloody Valentine, whose psychedelic production techniques Dan must have studied at length, because some of this stuff (such as ʽKid You'll Move Mountainsʼ ) often tends to sound precisely like MBV at their most trippiest: woozy, delirious grooves with interlaced ghostly over­dubs and whiffs of vocals that are sometimes felt more than heard.
As derivative as the overall style tends to be, it is still Dan's own: there's not enough somnam­bulant guitar drone here to qualify as «shoegaze», way too much non-electronic instrumentation to count as «electronica», and way too many borrowings from all sorts of musical genres to con­form to the already poorly understood definition of «folktronica». «Psychedelic» is the only term that fully applies, largely due to its inborn vagueness — this is music from another dimension, although, in nice contrast to much competition, it does not brag about its origins, but rather just behaves in an orderly, ordinary manner, humbly inviting you to try out the rabbit-hole instead of pulling you there by force.
The musical skeletons of these songs are less jazzy than before, and owe more to folk, classic Brit-pop, baroque pop, and even dance-pop — but really, the skeletons should be of more interest to musicologists than simple music listeners, because the sonic textures clearly take precedence here over basic composition. Once the groove is set up (and this is usually done quickly: Snaith is no lover of overlong intros), Snaith opens his mid-size bag of tricks and pulls stuff out largely at random — bombastic percussion bursts, pastoral flute passages, avantgarde jazz brass blows, angelic vocal chants, astral noises, and sometimes all of it at once (ʽBijouxʼ). Although it does have the unfortunate effect of making all the songs sound the same, the soothing countereffect is that Up In Flames is a pretty short record, and we could all stand fourty minutes of a same-soun­ding universe that could be best described as «trying to interpret the Animal Collective for a five-year old kid», or «a cross between Loveless and Sesame Street».
My only real problem with the record is the old «middle-of-the-road» problem: it all sounds very, very nice, but it never blows the mind in quite such a decisive way as its influences or the best of its contemporaries. Even when the man goes for a really large, quasi-epic sound, like on the sup­posedly climactic grande finale of ʽEvery Time She Turns Roundʼ, it still seems quiet and cloudy and a little too messy. All these sounds — the electronic blips, the sax farts, the chimes, the bells, the whistles — seem like packs of scurrying ants and other tiny insects under your feet, a hustle-bustle that is nice to observe from a certain vantage point, but hard to get into. Like I already said, at times this seems to be an advantage (humility, lack of emotional manipulation, etc.), but at other times you feel like he's gone too far in the other direction and does not give a damn about properly involving the listener at all. And that can be a little maddening.
Nevertheless, on the whole this is a major step forward from Start Breaking My Heart — more complex in almost every respect, and positioning Snaith in the respectable camp of people with a floating, rather than fixed, formula of self-improvement. And if you like this at least as much as I do, and definitely if you like this more than I do, go for the more recent expanded 2-CD edition that adds seven extra tracks: some of these, like ʽCherrybombʼ, go heavy on samples and dance beats and could work well on the floor, while others, like ʽSeaweedʼ, are more firmly rooted in the baroque-pop soil, merry chimes and all. Essentially more of the same, but focusing almost exclusively on the instrumental side of things. Thumbs up.
THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS (2005)
1) Yeti; 2) Subotnick; 3) A Final Warning; 4) Lord Leopard; 5) Bees; 6) Hands First; 7) Hello Hammerheads; 8) Brahminy Kite; 9) Drumheller; 10) Pelican Narrows; 11) Barnowl.
This is Snaith's first album recorded under the name of «Caribou», but the name change was triggered by the threat of a legal suit rather than any artistic reasons — Snaith's musical essence stays precisely the same. Well, not precisely: third time around, there's even more vocals, and it kind of becomes obvious that the man is trying to gradually shape his imaginative textures into pop hooks, moving from amorphous abstractionism into discrete abstractionism. This is kind of like a kids' room in MoMA now — happy colors, odd shapes, friendly disposition, psychological manipulation. You sure feel safe and warm in a world like this, but you don't even begin to truly understand it, because... well, just because.
The very first track is called ʽYetiʼ, but it neither features Tibetan musical influences nor is in any way related to the dark psychedelic jamming of Amon Düül II. Instead, it is a very lightweight soft techno-pop number, dominated by a shiny electronic riff and overdubbed with various silly sound effects. If it is indeed supposed to be a musical portrait of a yeti, it is quite a politically correct one — in quasi-real life, an actual yeti would hardly seem to be the ideal playing companion on the Sesame Street playground, but this one is almost cuddly. Later on, the sudden infatuation with East Asia reoccurs on ʽBrahminy Kiteʼ, another techno romp, very drum-heavy this time, but still very similar in atmosphere — "descending all the time, pretending all the time, pretending to be free" is Snaith's way of describing the bird, but the slightly cynical lyrics are not even one bit reflected in the feather-thin, electronic-baroque melodies.
Occasionally, stuff gets louder and crazier, like on the multi-part ʽFinal Warningʼ, a speedy, monotonous groove sprouting various bits of samples, backward tape recordings, distorted word­less vocals and every once in a while erupting in walls of noise, but they are friendly walls of noise, too, like large waves that periodically reach the electronic surfer and provide an incentive for fun rather than fear. ʽBeesʼ starts out very unusually, with a blues-rock-style twin guitar inter­play that even sounds somewhat snappy in the overall context of the record, but very soon, the guitars are complemented with Dan's mellow vocals (half-Beach Boys, half-Nick Drake), a folksy acoustic guitar part, then a pastoral flute part, and eventually, one more friendly noisy climax that hardly seems to mean any harm.
I do not care much for the brief instrumental links that join the tunes, but I do care that the man is also demonstrating some major folk-pop talent — for instance, ʽHello Hammerheadsʼ is a bit of a folk-pop gem with a smooth-as-butter merge between Dan's ideally delivered vocal lines and the two-part acoustic guitar overdubs. That's just one song, but it is of essential importance to the record because it provides some insight into the personality of this «Caribou» guy (at least, his artistic alter ego), confirming our suspicions that he likes to posit himself as a melancholic, but idealistic loner, taking after Brian Wilson and Nick Drake to the best of his 21st century man abilities. But for what he lacks in depth compared to those guys, he makes up with scope: the repetitive blues-rock of ʽBarnowlʼ takes its cue from Krautrock à la Neu! and even Can, with all that metronomic repetitiveness and all those psychedelic guitar tones. Only, once again, it's all nowhere near as disturbing or frightening as classic Can could be in their prime — because we don't want to scare off them kids.
Overall, as long as Snaith continues to make cautious progress, he's okay by me, and on this re­cord he's at least made progress by shedding some of his artistic anonymity and showing a trifle of personality — and it's a nice, intelligent, and creative personality alright, so thumbs up once again.
ANDORRA (2007)
1) Melody Day; 2) Sandy; 3) After Hours; 4) She's The One; 5) Desiree; 6) Eli; 7) Sundialing; 8) Irene; 9) Niobe.
I suppose that some time in the distant future, when man's memory will be sufficiently enhanced to enlarge the artistic pantheon to astronomic sizes, this album will go down as Snaith's master­piece. On the other hand, if at the same time man's capacity for emotional abstractionism also happens to be increased, so that the halls of MoMA and Beaubourg begin to resonate with sincerely shed tears of joy and wonder, Andorra's status might be challenged — because in 2007, it was the most «retro-sounding» and «sonically conservative» album that the man had produced to date. It was probably bound to happen, eventually, as artistic growth and evolution stimulated Caribou to embrace them good old values of late Sixties' / early Seventies' art-pop and symph-prog — without forgetting to integrate them with modern electronic technologies and production values, of course, but make no mistake about it: at the core of Andorra you find melodic content with a collective stamp of approval from Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee, Rod Argent, and even Jon Anderson (I hope they don't mind me speaking for them in this case).
The man pulls no punches whatsoever with this shift of style: without any atmospheric build-ups or warm-ups, ʽMelody Dayʼ opens the album crash-boom-bang style, with a driving rhythm, a bass-guitar-keyboard baroque-pop melody, and dreamy melodic vocals whose only purpose seems to be to recreate the tender idealism of 1967-68 right here and now. It's bouncy, it's taste­ful (watch out for them flutes and quasi-Mellotrons!), it's melancholic, it's well performed and produced, it's catchy — yes, it's a ghola of a song instead of the real thing, but you wouldn't even know that if you took it out of its context. In any case, it reflects perfect craftsmanship that Dan's previous output only hinted at, and it would be very impolite to state or even suspect that his heart was not properly in it.
The amazing thing is how he manages to crush the wall of biased scepticism — just as you think, «okay, he made this one good song and put it in the beginning to stun us, the rest will probably be boring soulless facsimiles, haven't we seen enough of these retro-freaks who honestly love old time music but lack the talent to properly recreate it?», he strolls on with ʽSandyʼ, a slower, but equally pretty upbeat love ballad that does not simply mimick the atmosphere of some Zombies masterpiece, but cares about intricacies and subtleties of vocal modulation: just listen to the way lines like "you can't believe me... like all of the others who leave me..." aim for your attention with a delirious falsetto flourish delivered in one heavenly swoop. Damn, that's seductive!
There's no way that the "and you and I will follow down the street" opening line of ʽAfter Hoursʼ is not a subtle reference to "and you and I climb over the sea to the valley", either, even if the song itself is too drone-based to properly sound like classic Yes — but no matter, the overall psychedelic-idealistic vision of some perfect world beyond regular human experience remains the same. If there's one thing that genuinely separates this music from its faraway ancestors, it is that little bit of shoegazing quasi-ambience that Snaith adds to many of the songs — like the chorus to ʽShe's The Oneʼ, jolting on one chord and one repetitive vocal phrase, something that both the Zombies and Yes would have probably found too tedious — but then again, if you are amalga­mating the Zombies and Yes in one package, you might as well throw in some Cocteau Twins and some Slowdive, why not?
If there's a possible problem to be found, one could look for it in the general similarity of the tone and the arrangement details on most of the tracks — not that the same problem cannot be con­jured for Pet Sounds or anything — but even that is somehow taken care of in the last track: the 8-minute «epic» ʽNiobeʼ is based on a soft techno groove, with Snaith's electronic arsenal finally unleashed on us in all its might, and just about every synth tone at his disposal partaking in the melee. It's not the best track on the album, but it is the most experimental, and although I fail to see what exactly this bunch of stylistically diverse synthesized sonic comets whooshing past the main body of the groove has to do with Niobe (do they represent her 14 dead children, or Apollo's and Artemis' arrows, or what?), I cannot deny the buzzing psychedelic effect, especially when you play this real loud in headphones. And even then, the vocals ("I fall so far, I fall so far...") are still old school art-pop to some extent.
Actually, it is not the instrumental monotonousness that worries me but the emotional mono­tonousness — all of the tracks being dominated by the same flavor of «optimistic sadness», like a never ending goodbye with faint hopes of saying hello once more in the distant future. To Dan's honor, he is able to escape the common trap of optimistically sad indie-pop sung by bearded men in furry hats — simply by being a better composer and arranger than most. But you do have to accept that he will be communicating pretty much the same mood, differing by the subtlest of subtle nuances, over and over and over; the fact that, for me at least, upon the third listen this ceased to be boring only goes to show how much real talent he has. I do hope the record was a big hit in Andorra, because there's hardly any reason to be called that unless the man wanted to conquer an additional 85,000 head strong market — but even though I'm no citizen of Andorra myself, I am glad to throw in my thumbs up as well, for extra international endorsement.
SWIM (2010)
1) Odessa; 2) Sun; 3) Kaili; 4) Found Out; 5) Bowls; 6) Leave House; 7) Hannibal; 8) Lalibela; 9) Jamelia.
Bad move, brother. Somebody must have heard Andorra and said, «Hey Dan, I like what you're doing and all, but this is frickin' granddad-pop here, surely you're not willing to forget that the world has moved on a bit in the last fifty years? And didn't you used to be like an electronica guy and stuff like that? What's up with this quasi-Zombies shit?» And for all we know, the «some­body» in question could have been Dan himself.
Anyway, the fact is that Swim sounds nothing like Andorra, but neither does it return properly to the stylistics of Snaith's Manitoba period, when he was wondering what would avantgarde jazz sound like if you programmed it into computers. Instead, Swim straightforwardly plunges into dance-pop territory — almost everything here is in the soft house / techno ballpark, even though some non-electronic instrumentation is retained (electric guitars, harps, bells, whatever) and the vocals reflect Dan's usual psycho-folk sweetness instead of being suitably robotized for the elec­tronic palette. In other words, this is truly the sound of somebody who suddenly awoke to the fact of «slipping into the past» and is now desperately scrambling back to catch up with the present.
And I feel really torn about this. On one hand, Swim is not entirely «anti-Caribou»: all the tracks reflect a very high level of craft — they build up, they look for unusual instrumental combina­tions, they really want to synthesize classic elements of art-rock and psychedelia with modern electronic rhythms and produce a sort of «art-dance-pop», think a Pet Shop Boys collaboration with Rod Argent. But on the other hand, all of this is done at the expense of the heart-gripping hooks of Andorra — it's a record I could learn to live and respect, but I could never ever have any «intimate» relationship with it, if you do know what I mean.
I will not go any further than the first (and, apparently, one of the most revered by the album's fans) track here, which is called ʽOdessaʼ for some reason, even though it brings on no associa­tions whatsoever with either the Black Sea or the Bee Gees. It's funky, ruled by over by a thick burping bassline and further populated with ghostly high-pitched wails, bell sets, and a vocal part that tries to evoke feelings of sadness and compassion for the female protagonist — "she's tired of cryin' and sick of his lies". It's a technically impressive piece of work, and it could work, but... somehow, I don't believe that it does. It's not «creepy» — the entire atmosphere is too bouncy, light, inoffensive for that. It's not «melancholic» — melancholic moods aren't usually associated with funky dance rhythms. It's not «tender» — the synth wails and the bells and the deep bass prevent you from mellowing out properly. So what is it? I'm not sure. At least Andorra exuded a definite aura of kindness and warmth, but here this aura seems to have been corrupted and dissi­pated, as if he wanted to make a track that sounded warm-friendly-optimistic and dark-hostile-pessimistic at the same time, but in the end the two sides simply outcancel each other.
Unfortunately, it just does not get better: all I experience while the record is on is a sense of con­fusion and disorientation. Some tracks lend themselves easier to interpretation ­— ʽSunʼ, for in­stance, where the vocals are limited to a single endlessly swirling sample of "sun, sun, sun...", is like an electronic prayer to the light, accompanied with a dance ritual routine; even so, I feel routinely bored with its electronic psychedelia which, despite all the painstaking overdubs, does not sound like anything I have not already heard a hundred times before done better by «legiti­mate» techno artists. Other tracks seem to operate on the one-idea principle: ʽLeave Houseʼ, for instance — take this single flute phrase and loop it to infinity, then throw on whatever comes into your head at the moment. Very modern, very spontaneous, very tiring.
On a particularly good day, I could just express my usual respect to the level of craft and leave it at that; but I do tend to work in context, and it really pisses me off how, upon having released a near-perfect synthesis of modern sensitivity and ancient influences of Andorra, the guy just had to go ahead and spoil it all to hell. Feel free to disagree in this case (I can actually try to under­stand people who get their full set of kicks from this kind of music), but as of now, this is such a disappointing downer that thumbs down seem like the only possible option.