Caribou

• HorsePower
  Tweet

Sep 16, 2010

Adjusting To The Lightness, The Darkness, The Hot And Cold

Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

There are moments in listening to Caribou albums, where you feel as if you're experiencing one of the many scenes in "Requiem For A Dream." One where you're visually and emotionally assaulted with close-up stimuli, shooting at you like snowflakes hitting your windshield while you're driving on the interstate at night in a blinding blizzard - only the snippets are slowed down a bit so that you can make them all out. Nonetheless, you feel as if you're getting the effect of getting struck with countless conjoined ideas, all fusing into one monologue that's going to take some time to achieve clarity. We're in the thrust of a sped up pupil dilating. We're thrown into a kitchen -- out of thin air -- to a skillet sizzling the liquid out of and the whites into a couple eggs and we're placed inside a microwave oven where the sensation of a pad of butter melting down and over the top of a cinnamon roll actually feels like a close and personal encounter with the music itself. Canadian Dan Snaith creates songs that are so touchable and so visual and yet they all contain such opposite and equal reactions at the same time. They are untouchable and mysterious. They are filled with eighteen different personalities, but they all share the same roof and that means that they find a way to coexist together and like pets starting to look like their owners and spouses like each other, over a long enough period of time, the sounds and arrangements - draped with a pointed and very focused vision that snakes through all that Snaith puts his hands on - quickly begin to share organs and limbs. Sooner than you'd think - these melting butter sounds, these pops and crackles, these eyes adjusting to the lightness or darkness in the room, these chases and these altercations - you find yourself confusing them for identical twins, believing that they sound alike and alive with the spirits of the collective. They must not be separated for half of them would perish and you'd be left with a puddle on the floor. Caribou makes music, that while it feels as if we're supposed to be cozying up to another body, conserving body heat for a long night to it, we're also supposed to be forgetting ourselves in it, feeling as if the flames are upon us and we're drinking too much. It's so hot, it's cold and we're experiencing the clashing of fronts, feeling that our concerns about what we should be wearing are unwarranted. We'll be sweating either way we lean.
 
Caribou Official Site
Merge Records

Session Comments

Older Comments