Dan Snaith's Caribou project, to borrow a line from another Canadian songwriter, has been a zigzagging journey through the past. He was most entrenched in the present moment on his 2001 debut Start Breaking My Heart, but even that record's soft-focus, post-Aphex Twin electronica seemed pulled from two or three years earlier. By 2003's Up in Flames he began glancing at psychedelia, but through a distinctly 1990s lens, mixing the cracked sensibility of Boces-era Mercury Rev with the ecstatic come-together crescendos of big beat. Milk of Human Kindness from 2005 was connected closely to its predecessor, but it added the unblinking rhythms and tidy instrumental efficiency of 70s krautrock. And now, with his latest album Andorra, Snaith finally and fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, of the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and, of course, the Beach Boys.
The significant factor in Snaith's transformation from his instrumental beginnings is his increased confidence as a singer. On Up in Flames, the voice was another sound to be fed into the computer, a way to reference the idea of songs rather than actually sing them. From there, it's been an unsteady trajectory pointing toward songwriting proper, and with Andorra, Snaith seems to be paying attention to chords and melodic progression first. He may have even titled a song to commemorate the new development: "Melody Day", Andorra's first track and lead single, is the most tuneful of the bunch, with Snaith's high tenor sitting squarely in the center of the rolling drums, sleigh bells, flute, and what sound like vintage synths.
"Melody Day" is also significant for being the only track to fully embrace what has become a Caribou trademark: the brief pause at the end of a bar which explodes into an enormous volley of percussion. The album as a whole is a touch more subdued; these "big" moments-- which were at risk of becoming a cliché, anyway-- appear sporadically, and generally with less intensity. Instead, in Andorra's more song-oriented first half, Snaith creates tracks that startle with their lightness of touch and joyous evocation of honeyed late-60s guitar pop. A half-decade after the Elephant 6 movement first started to fade, Snaith's move can be seen as risky, but it succeeds, oddly enough, in part because of the one-man-band nature of his project. He still works essentially alone, playing and sampling instruments and building tracks with a computer, and his music, with its loops and thick production, retains the markers of his process. He's also not aiming his music at any sort of radio; the mid-range is jammed full, distortion pops up regularly without apology, and weird sounds appear from nowhere and zoom between the speakers.
The sunshine daydream reaches peak intensity five songs in with "Desiree", whose very title dates it perfectly: we know from her name that this girl might trip down the streets with the Association's Windy, perhaps looking for kicks or waiting for Mary to come along. There's barely any percussion to speak of, just swells of synthetic strings, bits of flute, zooming harp runs, and chiming guitar leading to a big chorus that's all Snaith's multi-layered voice. Then there's "Sandy" and "Irene", also names more likely in 2007 to belong to grandmothers. The former is a Andorra's most dynamic track aside from "Melody Day", and also has the most interesting vocal arrangement, its highly reverbed streaks of harmony suggesting of a pop-minded church choir. It hints that Snaith might also be taking lyrical inspiration from a earlier time: "Sometimes in her eyes I see forever/ I can't believe what we've found." The words here are not always intelligible-- there's often a lot going on, so they're easy to miss-- but it's safe to say that the music carries the bulk of the emotional meaning.
Andorra takes an odd detour over its final three songs. "Sundialing" returns to the repetitious Neu!-isms of Milk of Human Kindness but dresses up the steady rhythm with Day-Glo swirls. "Irene" is a short mid-tempo ballad that is instrumental through its first half, and even then the only sound is essentially a drum machine. The tune in its second half is vague, suggesting a more fleshed-out song sitting somewhere else that's never quite articulated. The eight-minute closer "Niobe" builds from bubbling, acidic synths and folds in tightly sequenced, Orb-like pulses, an extended slow-burn that occasionally threatens a big climax with a sampled drum fill but never quite goes there.
Considering its length and placement at the end of the record, "Niobe" is a tad disappointing, never quite acquiring the momentum its structure would seem to suggest. Still, it's also an encouraging sign that Snaith is thinking in these more open-ended terms, that's he's not confining himself to the retro pop explosion that, as he demonstrates here, he has essentially mastered. Andorra will undoubtedly win Caribou a lot of new fans and rightfully so; it's a big, bold, tuneful collection that impresses with its ambition and meticulous arrangement. But it's also nice to think that Caribou's course is not fixed, that the future might hold a few more surprises than what's found here.
