Admittedly, I was never a passenger on the Dan Snaith/Manitoba/Caribou train. Neither 2003's Up in Flames nor 2005's post-Handsome Dick-ed The Milk of Human Kindness struck me as any more than interesting experiments in collage and production dressed up in pop music's big sister clothes. Perhaps that was the idea, but to my mind it exposed the idea of IDM as an alibi instead of a legitimate genre unto itself. I listened to both records a couple of times, filed them away alphabetically, and recently thought about trading them in via LaLa.com.
Caribou's latest album, Andorra provides definitive proof that a) Snaith indeed has pop pretensions, and b) he is capable of making good on them. His work had always drawn upon '60s psych influences, but on Andorra the connection is made explicit; seeking more than a feeling, Snaith exhumes the whole formula, creating a record that cops, in turn, post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys' vocal stylings and cadence, The Zombies' filigreed chamber pop, and the playful experimentation of The Beatles circa Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's. Each track on side 1 seems designed (and fit) for inclusion on some future Nuggets comp, especially the blissed-out (and relatively conventional) lead single, "Melody Day."
Yet Andorra, though a pastiche, is far from a straight rip. The music is undeniably vintage Snaith; a close listen reveals his delicate hand at work, essentially creating a musical mosaic composed of hundreds if not thousands of ornate electronic manipulations massaged into a coherent, seamless whole. Furthermore he proves that he does not need to be shackled to conventional songforms like an errant child in order to retain some sense of shape - tracks like "After Hours"and "Desiree" overflow their molds, coalescing into singular, sprawling pop confections. Even when Andorra grows more atmospheric during the course of side 2, Snaith maintains discipline, crafting his IDM creations with a sculptor's touch; closing track "Niobe" is a controlled detonation of interwoven beats and synths, expanding and contracting kaleidoscopically.
At its very best, Andorra scales the same heights of perfection as 2006's undersung masterpiece, Junior Boys' So This Is Goodbye, welding pop classicism and romanticism to an expertly-crafted IDM chassis, and making certain that the latter always operates in service of the former. It is a marked sign of artistic evolution for Snaith, answering the questions posed by his prior work and signifying his arrival as an unlikely pop auteur. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay is that Andorra has secured its predecessors' place on my shelf in perpetuity: after all, maybe there's something I've missed.
Caribou's latest album, Andorra provides definitive proof that a) Snaith indeed has pop pretensions, and b) he is capable of making good on them. His work had always drawn upon '60s psych influences, but on Andorra the connection is made explicit; seeking more than a feeling, Snaith exhumes the whole formula, creating a record that cops, in turn, post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys' vocal stylings and cadence, The Zombies' filigreed chamber pop, and the playful experimentation of The Beatles circa Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's. Each track on side 1 seems designed (and fit) for inclusion on some future Nuggets comp, especially the blissed-out (and relatively conventional) lead single, "Melody Day."
Yet Andorra, though a pastiche, is far from a straight rip. The music is undeniably vintage Snaith; a close listen reveals his delicate hand at work, essentially creating a musical mosaic composed of hundreds if not thousands of ornate electronic manipulations massaged into a coherent, seamless whole. Furthermore he proves that he does not need to be shackled to conventional songforms like an errant child in order to retain some sense of shape - tracks like "After Hours"and "Desiree" overflow their molds, coalescing into singular, sprawling pop confections. Even when Andorra grows more atmospheric during the course of side 2, Snaith maintains discipline, crafting his IDM creations with a sculptor's touch; closing track "Niobe" is a controlled detonation of interwoven beats and synths, expanding and contracting kaleidoscopically.
At its very best, Andorra scales the same heights of perfection as 2006's undersung masterpiece, Junior Boys' So This Is Goodbye, welding pop classicism and romanticism to an expertly-crafted IDM chassis, and making certain that the latter always operates in service of the former. It is a marked sign of artistic evolution for Snaith, answering the questions posed by his prior work and signifying his arrival as an unlikely pop auteur. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay is that Andorra has secured its predecessors' place on my shelf in perpetuity: after all, maybe there's something I've missed.
