TOTW: Caribou_ Never Come Back

Caribou has always impressed me with his sweet and sour mix of light, clean electronic production, which belies darker subject matter in the vocals. His latest album “suddenly” follows the same formula, but goes even further with its overall sound.

“Never Come Back” came out earlier in the year, but I tend to wait until albums are released before listening to the preview tracks; they always skew my opinion of the album. It’s the clear single from the track listing and instantly stood out with its strong dance structure.

Opening solidly, with looped vocal samples and sawtooth synth stabs, which are slowly built on to form a fairly traditional house track; it is elevated to something exciting and fresh by his personal creative flourishes. Noteworthy examples include the de-tuning synth accompanying melodies and changing drum samples/machines in each section:

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TOTW Playlist:

TOTW: Daphni ft Paradise_ Sizzling

Dan Snaith is best known for his project Caribou, which blends dance and Indy to create some of my favorite albums of the past decade.

However today we’re going to focus on his other pseudonym. Daphni makes music that aims squarely at the dance floor and DJ record collections. The title track on the latest EP remixes “sizzling hot” by Paradise. Increasing the BPM, cherry picking the breaks and adding drum machines to beef up the track. Bringing it back to the clubs for a modern era.

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TOTW Playlist:

Albums of the year 2014: Caribou_ Our Love

caribou our loveOver 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.

 

TOTW: Caribou_ Back Home

The latest album by Caribou is fantastic and I will write about it in great detail later in the year. He’s managed to develop a unique sound that merges ideas from different forms of electronic music into something that feels mainstream with an alternative/experimental edge.

Back Home manages to blend an all out dance track with the kind of grandeur you would expect to hear in a John Barry, James bond title piece.

Track Of The Week: Caribou- Leave House

Hi all,

I have an extensive music collection and thought a good way to cheer up those Monday blues would be to post a track that I’m hooked on each week.

This week I have been listening to the composer Caribou, His latest album Swim has some really good tracks on it and some really interesting production, Leave house is one of my favourite tracks from the album: