Caribou : Honey
You know something is going right when an album would make you smile constantly if you could actually keep your jaw from falling on the floor. So ran my reaction to Honey, the new album from Ontario producer Dan Snaith under his most prolific and successful Caribou stage name. Snaith can clearly throw down a banger at any given moment, but this largest section of his discography isn’t nearly as oriented around the dancefloor as it is languid breakbeats and occasional proper singer-songwriting. It’s not everyday that a strategy as mundane as “more and faster” generates such drastically different results from a given norm, but by choosing to deliver about 10 percent more beats per minute he launches Caribou—and us—at least a world away.
Where past favorites like “Odessa” and “Home” successfully employed the tropes of hip-hop and trip-hop, many of the songs on Honey fall more in line with his more freewheeling Daphni project. There are specific references to classical two-step in “Do Without You,” to jungle and EDM in “Broke My Heart,” and so much leftfield house in “Dear Life” and the relentlessly entertaining M/A/R/R/S interpolation “Volume.” At its worst—which isn’t very bad at all—Honey revisits the French touch in a three-song stretch (from “Over Now” through “Climbing”) made as if Daft Punk were constructing Random Access Memories with just the hardware that earned them their first flowers.
These songs surf on staccato keyboard runs and swift, clipped drum samples. They surprise us with bass drops and youthful vocals, the latter all supplied by Snaith himself—yes, even the female-coded ones, with his signature tenor and falsetto run through AI technology. From the first cuts to the last, Honey is full of Caribou generating imagined 3-to-4-minute highlight reels of live gigs by the current big things in DJ culture, knobs a-twiddlin’ and pads a-tappin’ to broadly reflect an elder statesman’s view of the state of hyperpop and bass music. That view? Spectacular.
Label: Merge
Year: 2024
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Caribou : Honey
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Adam Blyweiss is associate editor of Treble. A graphic designer and design teacher by trade, Adam has written about music since his 1990s college days and been published at MXDWN and e|i magazine. Based in Philadelphia, Adam has also DJ’d for terrestrial and streaming radio from WXPN and WKDU.