Dan Snaith is done with hiding his eccentricities — he’s back with his first collection as Caribou since the polished dancefloor pop of 2014’s Our Love, and he’s letting his idiosyncrasies show.
Snaith’s fragile falsetto is one of the few constants on Suddenly, a strange album which restlessly plays with genre and form. Sparse opener Sister sees his vocals laid bare against haunting synths, and it’s intertwined with fluttering piano samples on Sunny’s Time.
There are odd edges everywhere, with Lime lunging wildly from lounge jazz to a low-fi folk dirge. Even when things come together perfectly on Home, a sample-heavy soul track full of wonder, it’s snatched away after little more than two minutes.
The variation makes it a difficult album to pin down. It’s the oddest, as well as the most personal and introspective Caribou collection yet. “These tracks were made for me,” he told the Standard recently, saying he wanted to create “exactly the opposite” to Our Love. It might be muddled at times, but in that sense Snaith has achieved everything he set out to do.
