I feel like I drew the short straw here. We have an artist that we all love and they have a new album out, easy right? Slam dunk. Everyone’s happy and we all have a 60 minute love-in on the pod about how amazing Dan Snaith (aka Caribou, aka Manitou, aka Daphni) is …
… wrong.
Dan goes and throws a curve ball (in some peoples opinion, in others, he follows an evolutionary path that he set out three albums ago) and release an album that I would argue not many people expected. I think a quick Caribou re-cap is in order;
- Dan Snaith, Canadian dude who makes music and aligns these with 3 identities … but to keep this simple we’ll focus on 2 if thats ok?
- Caribou is the identity that he tends to release hyper intelligent, elevated pop music with an electronic leaning (but TBF indulges many genres and sub-genres across it’s 6 albums). Caribou has traditionally been music for the headphones, the bedroom, the soul.
- Daphni is where Dan embraces the elecronic more and specifically embraces the dancefloor, this has traditionally music for the club.
- We all love Caribou.
- We have different favourite Caribou albums.
- This is important as I think what we expect or want from Caribou has a significant impact on our relationship with Honey.
Honey is Caribou’s 6th album. And it is different. But every Caribou album is pretty different. Andorra is 60’s Pysch Pop reinvented for the latter half of the naughties. Swim is my favourite Caribou album and is entirely different from Andorra in every way save for it’s inherent ‘Caribouness’. Anyone, any music fan especially, would be able to at least notice, if not describe the similarities between Andorra and Swim despite it’s significant differences. I resonated so strongly with Swim that I was almost in tears when Our Love was released. I was so disappointed. It literally took me years to come to terms with the album. I love it now. I don’t play it that often but I grew to love it and now recognise it’s inherent ‘Caribouness’ but I had a BIG, negative emotional response to it. I had a ‘mini-tanti’ as Hugh Grant calls it (basically he had a melt down on live US TV) … I had mine in Urmston, Trafford. ‘Suddenly’ was very much in line with ‘Our Love’ and was no surprise. It had ‘inherent Caribouness’ and followed a line from Our Love but was also a massive departure from Andorra in one direction and Swim from another.
Honey is another massive departure. It is 12 short tracks of very electronic music. They feel in one way, more Daphni than Caribou in that they feel more club focused … but they’re also all 3 min pop songs (more Caribou leaning?). There is pop brilliance and shine and it feels like it’s made for the radio as much as the club. I am not sure what radio but the tracks follow pop rules more than they follow dance floor rules (discuss)?
So, Dan is embracing the club. But he’s retaining the pop? For me, the album as a whole features much ‘inherent Caribouness’ but this is unevenly distributed across the tracks. With some feeling much less inherently Caribou, and in some people’s opinions, not Caribou at all.
We’ve already, mostly drawn our lines of battle.
On one side …
- This is a great album.
- If it was made by anyone else we’d be saying, it’s great, it makes me feel fucking old but it’s great.
- It is inherently Caribou, you just have to work for that a little more than other albums.
On the other side …
- … Well, some pretty uncomplimentary things.
- ‘this is not for me’ vibes
- Not a Caribou album.
- ‘Like being attacked by toddlers with Protools’
I get both sides but align with the former.
Let’s touch briefly on AI cause it feels like I have to. Dan uses AI tools to alter his voice. This is freaking some people out. It isn’t freaking me out. I don’t care. Musicians have been altering their voices for as long as they could, with what ever tools they had access too. For me this is a distraction. I don’t care. But I also get that some feel very strongly about this so we will defo discuss it at some length on the blog. My side of that conversation will be short … unless I get drawn into it.
I thought it would be The Power Ballad Themed ‘Spin It or Bin It’ that might divide us … but it appears that it is one of our favourite artists (and AI) that might do that! I am half dreading, half looking forward to the chat on the pod.
Come at me bros.
thisisnothappening.net 
I Like this album, with each listen I like it even more. I don’t understand why some of us don’t like it so I’m going to run straight at this. I feel this is largely been started around the AI thing. If you didn’t know that Caribou used AI on the vocals would it be an issue? Lets be honest, artist have been manipulating their voices for ages. What’s the big deal? Excluding the rapping I have zero issues with this. If he got AI to write the songs, etc. it would be a different story.
I find it interesting how much (at least on WhatsApp) this album has divided us. I really like it. All of the 4 singles in my opinion are ace, and the rest of the album patches the variance of them together nicely. Well, with the exception of Campfire, it’s really not my cup of tea.
Here’s my overview of the album and why it works track by track:
Broke My Heart – does it remind anyone else of Kyla – Do You Mind?
Honey – you ever seen a grown man do a bass face whilst quietly working on the train? The Guy across from me just has. This is a feckin floor smasher!
Volume – it’s as cool as they come. If this was a white label we’d be loosing our minds.
Do Without You – This is classic Caribou.
Come Find Me – this was a later summer anthem for me.
August 20/24 – Oh hi, it’s classic Caribou again.
Dear Life – I swear he did this live when we saw him a few years back, massively influenced by his live show.
Over Now – This is like Mylo wrote it.
Climbing – Lovely. What a nice bridge track.
Only You – Caribou stable.
Got To Change – Could have been on Odessa and a lovely end to the album.
One key point throughout this album is that as much as previous Caribou albums have been about love, this album is about a loss of love and the ending of a relationship. Just look at the track list. Previously I shared with the group that I wondered if Snaith’s marriage has ended, or perhaps he is just continuing his loosely themed albums about relationships.
I get that this may be more directed to Snaith’s other alter ego Daphni, but who cares. It’s the same dude. Noboby picks on the Rza and Bobbi Digital being too close? You could argue that this album is Snaith’s mid-age crisis. Some people buy a porche, Caribou is hitting the club with bass music. The pessimist in me wonders is this all ties into the theory of the end of a relationship.
I also have another theory; Suddenly is the odd one out. If you take that album out of the mix, Honey is a natural evolution following Our Love, Swim and Andorra. Pin pulled, grenade thrown…
Well, this is quite the musical grenade, into our TINH Venn diagram ™.
Nice write-up Joey, and sorry this fell to you for this month. MJ Lenderman is worthy of our attention but this feels like something that needs covering. We missed it at the time in February 2020 as an Album of the Month. I chose Holy Fuck’s Deleter in February, pretty much as it was coming out, and Nolan went with Rapsody in April and Joey went with Mac Miller in May, but Suddenly all ended up in our top 3s of the year. So this time around, it was essential really.
We all have our history with Caribou, and that is important here. I wasn’t onboard until Swim. Andorra has only been post-hoc for me, and never really connected as deeply as it perhaps should, given my love for electronica and how much (to me) that was only a distant cousin to the work that fully broke him into the mainstream. I remember seeing him play totally solo at Sonar, probably in 2010 as he was performing Swim. He was at the Sonar Day, playing with a drum kit and sequencer and mic. It was pretty incredible being there relatively early on before it all blew up. For me, I was not quite as in love with Our Love at the start, but it really did grow on me, and I love it dearly now.
But Suddenly I fell for immediately and HARD. It did something different – that hip-hop inflection of Home, the tenderness (and backstory) of Sister, the slow-burn of You and I, and the likes of Never Come Back, New Jade, Ravi and Lime, much closer (in retrospect) to Honey. But in there was so much of what I’d loved before, with even more emphasis: that dynamic range, the changes in pace (see the majesty of Cloud Song, Magpie or Like I Loved You), this light and dark and ability to create these wraparound songs that straddled the club and the afterglow – euphoric or desolate – that sat outside the dancefloor. And at the centre of it all was that voice: so fragile, so on the point of apparent collapse, lending so much of his work a tenderness and humanity that was often lacking in other electronic music. It was brought him to the top of all our consciousness. Even when it was bent and shaped – because Honey is hardly the first he’s manipulated himself – it retained something undefinable. And that’s what the essence of Caribou is to me. That humanity at its centre, as things shifted and swam around the melodies. That connection the music had with me.
So I was super excited when I heard there was new stuff. SO excited. And then I listened. And was confused. Where was the connection? Where was Caribou in there? I love his Daphni output. It pumps. But Daphni and Caribou were two alter-egos that felt separate. In Honey and Broke My Heart they felt combined. And they also felt like each’s power was diminished. Somehow less than the sum of the parts. I will admit I was disappointed. Really disappointed. “It’s ok”, I thought, “it’ll wind its way into my head, just like the others. Our Love took time.”
But…. I’m afraid it’s not happened. And this is new ground. We all have artists that this happens with. And let’s not get overblown. This isn’t Dylan going electric, or Radiohead going all Kid A on us. But…. music is really important. Perhaps too important to me sometimes. But the artists we love, they have such meaning to us. If Hot Chip or LCD put out an album I truly struggled with I’d be crestfallen. And that was where I sat for the first two weeks with Honey.
The thing is, it’s not a bad album. It’s a decent one. But it’s not what I see as Caribou. That there are flashes of his brilliance, of his character, of that voice, those melodies, make it all the more tantalising, but all the more disappointing in its moments too. I’m a dozen listens in, and it’s starting to feel softer to me, which is a relief. Because for a week, I actively disliked it. And that made me really sad. Music connects with us so elementally when it works. It really does. And I found the last 3 Caribou albums – while all subtly different, and all with their own energies and themes – to revolve around this central premise: the human dance music. A computer made man. The ability to cross over between so much of what I loved about music. I truly love some of these songs as the best I’ve ever heard. So yes, there’s going to be unrealistic expectations. But even with albums that didn’t quite hit the heights of previous work – Metronomy’s Small World and Hot Chip’s Freakout/Release – I still loved many things on there and once I’d got to know them, I still love them.
I just cannot say that here. Honey is not – I fear – ever going to get there with me. And I don’t know how to feel about that. At first I felt annoyed, angry even. Cheated. Hoodwinked.
But it’s not that simple, of course. So I’m trying to make sense of it. Here’s a few thoughts that I’ll take into the pod and try and make stick. (cue Joey’s bullets).
I find myself finding so many issues with so much of it at the micro level, it’s so hard to see the whole as up to the mark.
Now, to the elephant in the room: AI.
I am not a luddite. I get that AI is coming, it’s here. Arguing against its use is like an old man shouting into the wind. BUT…. this is at the heart of the issue I have with Honey. AI doesn’t kill it for me, but it increases its problems.
The bits where he’s substituted his voice are the weaker parts. His voice is one of his USPs. By relegating it for much of the album it takes away so much of what makes Caribou great. And once you are aware of it, you can’t put it back in its box. You can’t unhear it. It sounds at best ok, at worst – let’s just say Campfire and leave it at that, an experiment I hope he never comes back to – it’s bad. It just feels really unnecessary. He’s got every right to experiement, but with so many great vocalists out there, why use AI? It’s not hard to see the thin end of the wedge, where those great vocalists are redundant. It’s not flippant to say that.
And with that humanity diminished, the connection is never there as a whole work. An album just feels like a big computer slab of less good dancefloor music. If he’s going to try and hit the big stage festival sound, that’s his right. But i wonder if in doing that, he’s diminished what makes him what he is. And for the first time, he starts to sound like others (Daft Punk-lite in Climbing, or 80s pop in Over Now) and he never used to sound like anyone else. Now he sounds like others, and not as good as them. Its’ really disappointing to see.
I would love to know why, how, when he put this together. What he thought about it. But will we read about it? Nope. Not a jot. The silence of promo is truly odd. Snaith was never a really outgoing guy but it’s hard not to think this is something to do with the changes, and the AI. It’s pissed a lot of people off in many ways. Why not confront that? Saying nothing feels a bit of a conspiracy of silence.
And all of this? it adds up to a really sad experience for me. Underwhelming at times. A missed opportunity. And I am not over that yet. I may never be. And that is really a shit place to be with an artist I adore.
Gosh, well this is going to be a fun pod!
It’s always quite nice to go last on the feedback, in that you can soak up what everyone else is saying, and I did find both Joey’s write-up and both your responses really illuminating. I think we’ve established that there are battle lines on this album with Joey and Nolan in one corner, and Guy and me in the other. Guy, you said quite a few things I was going to say, not surprisingly perhaps, so I won’t reiterate them.
But I do what to start with explaining my own journey with this record. Nolan, you wonder if Guy’s and my antipathy to the record are based around AI. Honest to God, I don’t think that this the only issue here. And the reason I’d say that is that I didn’t know that Snaith had even used AI on the record until I’d spent a bit of time with several of the tracks – indeed, it was only when I read that Guardian review that I became aware of it. I was already struggling before I knew that.
Like a lot of artists these days, Snaith had released I think at least 4 tracks before the album dropped itself, and being the big Caribou fan that I am I already had in the playlist and was playing them repeatedly. And I was having a weird, very un-Caribou like experience with them. Normally, Caribou’s music becomes richer and more layered, the more you listen to it. I wasn’t having that experience with it all. Every time I heard a track like what turned out to be the album opener, Broke My Heart, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated by it. It had no subtly, it had no journey, it just did what it at its frantic pace over and over until – let’s be honest here – it became quite annoying. Ditto Volume, which initially feels like a clever sample that boils down the original MARRS track into a minimalist tribute, but again, it wears out its welcome very quickly. Neither of these tracks GO anywhere and I don’t hear any of HIM, any of Caribou in them. They could be by anyone.
I must say that at this point that I think my favourite Caribou is a wonky Caribou – I love the 60s pop influences in Andorra, but I also completely adore his last album suddenly, because it has ambient tracks on it, clever little leftfield slow burn numbers – it’s a really varied bag. His best music, for me, has so much soul and warmth. I know Our Love is a big fave for everyone, but I found its straight-down-the-line 4 to the floor dance vibe a bit obvious, and I don’t return to it the way some of his other work. So the kind Daphni style album that this purports to be was never going to be a fave for me. But I am kind of surprised how strongly and fiercely I dislike this record.
It feels lazy. It feels phoned-in. Half the tracks are generic dance tracks that have no personality and nothing special. I think Guy nails it here in describing it as an album that’s all in the MIDDLE – it’s tinny, it has no breadth and it’s not even a particularly enjoyable headphone experience. It’s so two-dimensional. The first three tracks are all pretty forgettable, and they don’t have any of the subtlety, complexity or richness of what I love about Caribou.
And then let’s get to the vocals….urgh! They are are TERRIBLE, sometimes toe-curlingly so. When I found out he used AI to turn his voice into all these other versions, it wasn’t that I suddenly hate the album, it was I understood why this was sub-standard compared to his other work. AI, at least right now, is a very blunt tool and he’s using to try and do something he normally brings such sophistication to. And that’s before I get to the rap on a truly awful track, Campfire. The track is already a steaming piece of turd, with these naff dayglo multitracked vocals that sound like a kind of weird Manga girlband. And then, out of nowhere, surely the worst rap in human history. I mean, FUCKING HELL. Never mind it doesn’t scan, keep time to the beat, or making sense, but it is an abomination and really, that should condemn this album on its own.
There is one decent track, Come Find Me, which would happily sit on Swim or Our Love, if I can ignore that AI vocal for long enough. And there a couple I can tolerate, like perfectly the perfect serviceable pop of Only You. Actually, I say a couple, but I don’t know that there is even another song on this album that I like!
Interestingly, another electronic artist released an album this week – Kelly Lee Owens. Her new album, Dreamstate, is a fascinating counterpoint to this, because both artists do that incredible thing with their best work of bringing humanity and warmth to digitally made music. In my view, Dreamstate does everything that Honey fails to do – it keeps Owens’ own personality right in the centre of her music and it makes it such a joy to listen to because you can hear a human being communicating with you. I don’t hear Snaith’s creative intent on most of Honey – I just hear a hyperactive AI version of himself selling something that feels like it has lost the one thing that made it special.
What happened to Dan Snaith’s quality control, I wonder? My guess is that he’s fascinated by technology, and in the case of this album, has tried out some new experiments. I heard him on 6Music last week and I was reminded of what a thoughtful, humble guy he is. But I think he has made a major misstep with this record, probably the first major one in what is a pretty illustrious career. Guy, you said you didn’t think this was a bad album. I would go much further – I think it is. For me, I think this a 100% nailed-on stinker, and the biggest musical disappointment of the year.
Bring on the pod, it’s going to be tasty!
Shall we bring in friend of the pod Alex B to arbitrate this one?