Caribou: Our Love

Over the Past Couple of albums Dan Snaith has taken the Carbou sound further away from psychedelic pop and towards electronic music and with great success.

Our Love continues this by covering different genres of electronic music with his unique style of sound design and production. He manages to tread a fine line between organic sounding drum patterns with a lot of natural swing and the structured rhythmic nature of dance music. This applies across the board with the rest of his instrumentation. Synths can wobble into tracks drifting around their tuning Like a buoy out at sea but they still remain anchored to their position in the track. It’s this mix between the randomness of his psychedelic sound and the structured conformity of electronic music that makes repeat listens so enjoyable.

Snaiths production style has also gotten bolder in this album. A perfect example of this is in the Single “Can’t Do Without you” which literally doesn’t open up until the one minute thirty mark when he removes EQ from higher and lower frequency ranges. This gives an effect of a dance style drop without a large change in instrumentation. For a dance track this is rather unique and to do this almost halfway through, certainly shows the confidence in his vision which continues across the album.

The album works as a whole not only in its sound design but also its tone. The concepts of love and loss are pretty traditional areas of study for most musicians, but it’s done here from maturity rare in the dance genre. That could be said for the whole album, Dan Snaith on albums Swim and now Our Love has created music that is accessible to the everyman whilst still having flavourings of more experimental genres. As with album Swim his unique sound will keep me coming back to our love for many years to come.