Over the past decade, Caribou has been whittling down his music. Dan Snaith’s songs were once a constant swirl of brightly colored baubles, as pleasingly jumbled as the view through a kaleidoscope. With 2010’s Swim, the muddle began coming into focus. The melodies were brighter, the beats more direct. Things got sharper still on 2014’s Our Love, which filtered the pleasures and anxieties of domesticity through the prism of house music at its most ebullient. That simple title spoke to Snaith’s growing interest in getting at the essence of things. The emotions he was grappling with were complicated—in interviews, he spoke eloquently about the trials of marriage and fatherhood—but he had a way of framing messy feelings in bold strokes. The album’s biggest song, “Can’t Do Without You,” featured few lyrics save its titular refrain, repeated over and over, turning its ambiguous double negative into a mantra-like affirmation.
Suddenly is more stylistically varied than Our Love or Swim, but it’s also the most direct that Snaith has sounded. Many of its standout songs are just two or three minutes long, perfect models of pop economy. The anthems are punchier: The dusty boom-bap of “Home” is the platonic ideal of a rare-groove edit, “Never Come Back” the epitome of a piano-house barnstormer. There’s nothing generic about even his most exacting genre studies: A Caribou song will always sound first and foremost like a Caribou song, thanks in part to Snaith’s distinctive falsetto, which graces every song here. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.
Snaith’s beat-making has gotten more adventurous, too. He flits between rock, trap, UK garage, disco, and more, sometimes touching on two or three styles in the course of a single song. His drums are sharp and every hi-hat and cowbell is rendered in crisp hi-def and seems to hover in mid-air, like a 3D image. In this heady precision, Suddenly can be an almost dizzying listen. Caribou’s music has never leaped from the speakers quite the way it does here.
That outward clarity masks the growth in Caribou’s songwriting. Snaith has rarely been a strictly autobiographical lyricist, but not all of Our Love’s tales were as elegant as “Can’t Do Without You”. He has said that he’s the kind of person who might not know the lyrics to his favorite song, and on Our Love, you could tell. The lyrics felt more like placeholders, cue points where listeners might project their own more detailed experiences. Suddenly follows a period of turmoil in his extended family—a string of death, divorce, and other assorted shrapnel that falls within the blast radius of middle age—and, coincidentally or no, his writing has improved greatly. The stories he’s telling feel more substantial, as does his ability to assume the voices of a wider cast of characters. He still has a hard time resisting the pull of an easy couplet; the album is peppered with rhymes like “know” and “grow,” “in the past” and “here to last.” But he tends to use his voice as just another source of tone color. It is, truly, a lovely instrument, as limpid and azure as the photograph of water on the album’s cover.
Snaith’s principal strength remains his skill as a musician and producer. He’s got hooks for days, and you could heat a single-family home by the warmth of his chord progressions. Virtually every song has some little detail that makes you lean in closer. There’s a marvelous moment in the opening “Sister,” in which the synthesizer detunes by just a few cents, almost imperceptibly, just enough to change the temperature in the room. “Like I Loved You” features a rippling jazz-guitar solo from Colin Fisher, the album’s only guest musician, that rolls like marbles on the deck of a boat.
In “Sunny’s Time,” tape-warp effects give the song’s central piano melody the texture of shirred silk, while a gruff hip-hop sample is chopped to ribbons and filtered in a way that accentuates the grain of the rapper’s voice, which is rendered all but unintelligible. It’s a fresh, surprising choice: Producers have been cribbing funk breaks like the one Snaith grabs for “Home” for decades. But by zeroing in on that gravelly vocal texture, “Sunny’s Time” gives Suddenly the feel of being in conversation with mainstream popular music—or eavesdropping on it, anyway.
Listen through enough times, and you may think you hear more songs than are listed on the sleeve. Time and again, songs feint left in their final minute or two. “New Jade,” a kind of psychedelic, maximalist R&B, suddenly flips into a gothic snippet of synth and flanged guitar, like something off the Cure’s 1980 album Seventeen Seconds. The chunky soul of “Home” gives way to fingerpicked folk guitar. And “Lime,” a jazzy house tune in the vein of Theo Parrish, abruptly stops and cuts to a much slower sample of Black Soul’s “The Sphynx,” a dirge-like meditation from 1975. This collage-like construction most likely reflects the way the record came together: Snaith has said that in the five years since Our Love, he amassed an archive of 900 loops and sketches, the products of his daily studio practice. The stragglers that seem to have snuck in here, under cover of the completed songs, are a big part of the record’s charm: They enliven the mood and keep things moving.
All these trap doors sometimes give the impression that there’s another album hiding in the shadows of Suddenly, like those vinyl records that have a secret track carved between the grooves of another song. It can be tempting to wonder what that hypothetical album might have sounded like, and where Snaith might have wandered had he given free rein to his experimental instincts. The mood throughout is so sweet, the harmonies so reassuringly consonant, that I occasionally long for a little more discord. In paring back, it sometimes feels like Snaith is holding back; I miss the occasional overload of Swim, where Caribou’s newfound discipline gave way to his psychedelic second nature, and it felt as if the tape couldn’t take all the input that he was throwing at it.
Suddenly, in contrast, is almost all business—with a few salient exceptions, the most moving of which comes right at the end. Album closer “Cloud Song” begins as a meditation for voice and unaccompanied synth, but it builds and builds—layers accruing, waveforms morphing, harmonies slipping out of tune. “I’m broken, so tired of crying/Just hold me close to you,” he sings, as a flood of frequencies gushes forth from his electronics. In this brief moment, all the control of the previous 40-odd minutes is washed away. Witnessing Snaith in full command of his talents is gratifying. But this moment where it all threatens to fall apart is what makes his music feel not just relatable but consequential.
Buy: Rough Trade
