Caribou
Honey
MERGE
At this point in our national history, a colorful house music break feels necessary—like shafts of sparkling light cutting through the smoke and cloud cover of war games, another devastating hurricane, and escalating election theatrics. Over the past 10 albums and various stage names, Dan Snaith (a.k.a. Caribou or Daphni or Manitoba) has chiseled his electro-pop music down to its bare and bass-heavy essentials. For the propulsive and inventive Honey, Snaith fully leans into the deep-house side of his brain that Daphni has long occupied and jettisons a healthy chunk of the introspection and personal melancholia heard on 2020’s Suddenly or 2014’s GRAMMY-nominated Our Love. Instead, he opts for the bass beats and psychedelic swirl heard on 2010’s percussive house statement Swim.
Honey is a dance record more than anything Caribou has put out before, which works well for repeat listens. Snaith manipulated his voice to replicate various ages, genders, and android entities on the project, and that wide vocal range is largely the key for its success. You can hear many of those voices cycling through the eerie “Campfire” and album opener “Broke My Heart,” the latter of which switches off between tight automaton vocals during the hook and a whisper-soft feminine voice for the verses. The song’s soft and skittering synth beat launches into a seismic shimmy when the bass drops.
Huge dancefloor moments crater the landscape of Honey. The title track’s bass beat, for example, feels like a hold-my-beer moment in relation to “Broke My Heart” as it keeps escalating for four minutes of incredible dance music. “Come Find Me” approaches the caliber of hook that breakout Caribou tracks like “Do Without You” and “Odessa” once served his career a decade or so ago. Snaith also throws in a wonderful rework of the 1987 hit “Pump Up the Volume” on “Volume.” The M|A|R|R|S original was a special song for a young Snaith, since it was the first time he heard electronic music, basking in the aural glow of the family stereo system while listening to the top-40 countdown. There’s a real sense of rediscovering a buried joy in that song and its ’80s-homage music video.
Caribou has released another quiet stunner of a record, and even the softest songs in the back half of Honey still hold listeners’ attention. Whereas Suddenly had some meandering notes and little vaporous experiments, Honey keeps that to a bare minimum and focuses on the dancefloor and ways to move the body by reengineering vocal melodies like they’re just another input to turn up, turn down, or tweak out. Dan Snaith is back and it's another warm day on the dancefloor.
