Trust a balding guy in brown Birkenstocks to be behind this year’s most heartfelt album. Dan Snaith may look like he’s about to fill out your income tax form, but don’t write him off as someone who doesn’t radiate emotion. As Caribou, the Canadian producer has gradually become one of dance music’s best-loved eccentrics, revered for the way his breakthrough 2010 album Swim makes weird, psychedelic sadness sound like a sweaty E-hug, and uniting indie and electronic fans.
Snaith’s fourth album, Our Love, once again showed that this teetotaller with a maths PhD knew all about how to get people high on feelings alone. A case in point is album opener Can’t Do Without You – essentially a song-long crescendo, the titular mantra repeated while hyper-chromatic synths bloom. It’s not exactly four-to-the-floor but it was created with Balearic sunsets in mind, as well as his wife. “I don’t have a particularly exceptional life but at least I can sing about the things that are happening in my life and it feels meaningful,” he told the Guardian earlier this year.
Club bangers have long been littered with platitudes about losing yourself to dance or feeling someone up at the end of the night. Our Love, though, runs deeper. Its songs are about the complexities of adult relationships, whether new fatherhood or friends’ divorces – even deaths. Julia Brightly, for example, a sliver of frenetic garage-house and funereal organ, is named in tribute to Snaith’s late, transgender sound engineer, who had not long transitioned before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And yet despite this bittersweet melancholy, and Snaith’s chilly falsetto, Our Love manages to sound like it’s bathed in a warm, amber glow.
Less enamoured critics have called Our Love “disappointingly shallow” – production-wise, at least. But while the album is a more straightforward serving of Snaith’s dizzyingly precise ambient, krautrock and fuzz-house mosaics, it’s still delightfully oddball. Few others would address the current R&B trend by making a track that’s completely beatless, as on Second Chance, its breathless vocals from fellow Canadian Jessy Lanza. Or, as on Mars, attempt to pull off hip-hop with a flute. Our Love isn’t an agenda-setting album but its slowburners are full of feeling. Sometimes that’s the biggest statement it’s possible to make.
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