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Caribou.
 Caribou is the working name of Canadian psychedelic plunderer Dan Snaith. 'The Milk Of Human Kindness' is Snaith's third LP and his first since 'Handsome' Dick Manitoba, lead singer of '70s punks The Dictators, forced Snaith to change his name from Manitoba. Maintaining a patriotic feel, Snaith chose to rename himself after one of his country's best-known creatures.
His interest in the images conjured by nature is reflected in his track titles. "It's a funny thing because the music has nothing really to do with words whatsoever. When it comes to putting track titles on it's more a case of just choosing words that I think are interesting. I guess I like the nomenclature associated with nature and the animal kingdom and there's lots of interesting weird words and words that haven't been co-opted by hipness and musicians so much so far."
So we have the album opener Yeti, a warm polyphonic pulse, far removed from a giant snow beast, only laying down big footsteps of drums at track's end. Bees and Hello Hammerheads are similarly plodding, the drums pushed right back in the mix, Snaith playing a slowed-down Arthur Lee or Colin Blunstone, until veritable explosions of busy drums enter again and turn Bees first into a swirling stewpot of tumbles and cymbals.
"I think the one thing that I wanted to do on this record is have it be a lot more dynamic, a lot more loud and soft. It's easy when you're making live loop based music to be going in at the same level. Having played live for the last couple of years I've kind of realised how important dynamics are in music and how it contributes to that kind of mad feeling of energy that I wanted to get across on this record."
Confessing to an "appreciation for sloppy music" Snaith is a champion of finding the right sounds from the right places and putting them all together to make a beautiful jigsaw, a tapestry of beats heaped with cascading melodies, tonal bursts of beautiful noise and Snaith's languid vocal style. Stylistically Caribou traipses the huge playing ground between '60s psych-pop and futuristic electronic music, but it is the love of the beat and the understanding of hip-hop as an agent for song construction that makes Snaith's music so appealing, inimitable and fresh. After spending years becoming increasingly frustrated with four-track recordings, Snaith switched to a computer program, utilising it more as a multi-track recording device rather than a means to process sound. "It's called Acid. I haven't even updated the version that I use; it's for kids tinkering around," he chuckles. "The minute I found out about recording on the computer all of a sudden I was just gone. Having as many instruments as you want suits my kind of maximal approach to music."
He couldn't have put it any better. 'The Milk of Human Kindness' is chock-full of layers, of tones, rhythms, colours and frequencies. Snaith revels in the "happy accidents" that spring up each time he sits down to record. "One of my favourite things when I'm recording is something getting in there by accident and interacting with another sound in a certain way that it kind of makes sense, or the kind of melody builds out of two different parts that ended up next to each other by accident. There's no envisaging of anything," he quips, laughing. "I do kind of work on the songs obsessively until I'm totally happy with them but it's much more like mess around, let accidents happen and come back to it a week later and see which ideas sound good and which need to go or whatever. There will be no common ground between where I start and where it ends."
Caribou's notorious stage show is incendiary. Snaith is joined by two cohorts and between them they play two drum kits, guitar, synth and much more. "We use a lot of the same shitty keyboards and shitty samplers that I used to put together the album. I think it contributes a lot to the sound of everything we use, those same elements on stage. More than anything I just want it to be a psychedelic explosion when you come and see it live, that it's almost too much to take in when it's coming out of these big speakers in front of you. The idea is as much stimulus as possible". As if a streamlined organic juggernaut of sound isn't enough, the animations of Delicious 9 add more to the already heady experience. Ranging from computer generated graphics, hand animations and the use of characters as vocalists while the band churns out the music, the Caribou live show will bedazzle, dumbfound and turn your brain inside out.
Lenin Simos
 | dB magazine proudly present Caribou at Fowlers Live on Wed 20 July with Clue To Kalo and Mr Wednesday. |
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