Album: Caribou - Honey

Dan Snaith’s career has been a joyous thing to watch. Almost a quarter of a century the Canadian started out as Manitoba (soon renamed to Caribou) making a giddy mixture of dreamy ‘60s psychedelic pop, glitchy electronica and then cutting-edge dance music.

Since then, much like his friend and contemporary Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden – latterly joined on their journey by Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd – he’s refined and tightened his sound, reaching bigger and bigger crowds, while impressively retaining the same fundamental character and inspirations. 

This is his 11th full album – eighth as Caribou/Manitoba, plus there have been three under his more stripped back dance guise Daphni – and it fizzes with delights. It certainly bears comparison to Floating Points’s recent Cascade LP as both are full of modular synth patterns purpose tooled to provide grandiose rushes for arena-sized crowds. However where FP has stretched these out often over eight, nine minutes, Snaith is all about pop thrills. There are only three tracks over four minutes here, and many are considerably shorter, and they all go in immediately with hook upon hook. 

There’s a lot that recalls classic 00s French electro-rave – many pieces sound like Justice at their least rockist, and the miniature “August 20:24” is a delirious nod to the fizzy filter madness of Daft Punk at their Discovery best. But there’s also plenty of the boom and shuffle of UK garage – which Snaith was almost unique among experimentalists in supporting early on and has always incorporated – and most of all, that sweet indie / psyche pop sense of song structure, sublimated into the dance energy admittedly but constantly present nonetheless. In lesser hands the firework like constant technicolour stimulation could be exhausting, but as it is, this is an object lesson in retaining unique personality while making straight-up bangers. 

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@joemuggs

Listen to "Honey"