Skip to main contentDan Snaith learns to swim—and makes his best record between lessons.
[LIQUID FUSION] Before he began working on his new album, Dan Snaith finally learned to do something most kids pick up somewhere between riding a bike and tying their shoes: swimming from one end of a pool to the other.
"My wife got me swim lessons for Christmas two years ago, and I just became obsessed with it," says an enthused Snaith. "The more I got into it, the more it felt graceful. It was a good counterpoint to making music all the time."
Those aquatic lessons turn up all over Swim, Snaith's latest recording under the stage name Caribou. After years of dabbling in different genres—psychedelic '60s pop songwriting on 2007's Andorra, propulsive krautrock on 2005's The Milk of Human Kindness—the new full-length is his own vision, merging sonic experimentation, liquefied percussion and a dance floor smarts to a set of tight pop songs. Though you can hear bits of Arthur Russell's future disco and the fluid electronic compositions of James Holden on Swim, the record is really of a synthesis of all the music Snaith's made over the past nine years.
"I felt like I had pushed the ideas on Andorra as far as they could go," he says. "It was easy for people to go, 'Oh, I get it, he's the nostalgic '60s guy.' I wanted to dispel that by doing something that's my own as much as possible."
Swim mixes live instrumentation, loops, electronic percussion and Snaith's tender vocals (which are a total dead ringer for Russell on the house music-infused lead single, "Odessa") into a swirling, breathing whole. Unlike Andorra, which saw him sit down and try to write "actual pop music" for the first time in his life, Snaith says he went into this set with no expectations or burdens. Swim sounds human in a way that some of his older work felt processed. The difference is heard most openly in his vocals, which, for the first time, are naked and untreated. Snaith used to hide his voice; now singing is just something else he's learning how to do.
"I'm the kind of person that likes to tackle new things" he says. "I guess that's just part of my obsessive personality. If not swimming, it would surely be something else."
SEE IT: Caribou plays Wednesday, May 26, at the Hawthorne Theatre, with Toro Y Moi. 9 pm. $15. All ages.
WWeek 2015