Album of the week: Our Love, by Caribou
Caribou, one of the stage names of Canadian Dan Snaith, is best known for his 2010 eerie earworm Odessa, which combined wonky cowbells with smoky synth lines that felt like dry ice. It was a standout song in a smashingly good year for indie electronic music (Delorean, Emeralds, Four Tet, Hot Chip … the list goes on). The album it came on, Swim, felt otherworldly.
Caribou
Merge
Caribou, one of the stage names of Canadian Dan Snaith, is best known for his 2010 eerie earworm Odessa, which combined wonky cowbells with smoky synth lines that felt like dry ice. It was a standout song in a smashingly good year for indie electronic music (Delorean, Emeralds, Four Tet, Hot Chip … the list goes on). The album it came on, Swim, felt otherworldly.
His latest album, Our Love, returns to earth. Loosely speaking, it's dance music, the kind that creeps out of speakers towards the end of the night, when the dancefloor is half empty and sticky with booze. Like Swim, the music is at once hot and cold, like a high that rolls off the skin in waves. Deadening joy, perhaps. The effect is unnerving.
Our Love is strongest when it embraces this tension (especially on Silver and Your Love Will Set You Free, the best tracks). In the middle, though, the album sometimes loses its strange lustre: Snaith slips too often into the clichés of club time - for instance, a lecherous reliance on breathy, roboticised moans and sexy-baby falsetto. The bassline on the title track is something we've heard a thousand times, and Second Chance is uncomfortably reminiscent of FKA Twigs: "Tell me there's a second chance baby…"
Still, the album's a coup, especially when emotion leaks in through hairline fractures in the basslines.