Title: Up In Flames
Artist: Caribou (under his discontinued Manitoba moniker)
Length: 39:02 (10 tracks)
Label: The Leaf Label
Year: 2003
Over the past two decades1, Dan Snaith has consistently produced great music across different genres and projects. It was hard to pick which Caribou album would make the list2, and that’s before you get into his dance music project, Daphni3. Up In Flames earns the spot because it meets the ideal Trash Draft album length4 and displays his work’s creativity, songwriting, and rhythmic chops.
I hate being this guy in 2024, but this really is a headphone record. There’s a lot going on in every song. There are swells of breakbeats, deep friend saxophone solos, 60s AM pop interludes, vocal glitches, and the squeaks of guitar strings often compounded within the same 45 seconds of a song. Each song is a mosaic of bric-a-brac, found items fractured and recontextualized into a larger whole. Like Trash Draft favorite The Avalanches, you can lose hours tracking samples and referring to the source material from Caribou songs.
The audio tchotchke maximalism could get grating, but Snaith displays a masterful sense of when to layer in the busier aspects of the music and when to let the song breathe. On “Hendrix with Ko” (co-written with frequent collaborator Koushik5) , Snaith rides breakbeats and snare shuffles into jetstream grooves and then drops the throttle to let the song glide back to earth. On “Bijoux,” you can feel Snaith shoveling more coal into the furnace as the skittering chimes are layered with drums, keys, horns, and vocal lines, and just as the song is about to boil over, a steam valve is released, and the track melds together. This alchemy is a hallmark of his work as a DJ and dance musician; he has a great sense of when to heighten suspense, sustain a groove, and use the kinetic energy of a song to bring all the elements together at the right time.
Sometimes I like to tie a bow on these with insight into how these albums played into my life, or some larger theme related to the work. Not here! This is just a really nice album, and you should listen to it.
One for the Road
Dan Snaith has taste. If the Caribou record isn’t your scene, but you like certain sounds from it, I recommend that you look to his public playlists for ways of finding new music. Here are some of my favorite forms of public curation that Dan does:
“The Longest Mixtape”: In 2015, Dan created a now commonplace (but felt insane in 2015) “dump” style playlist of the 1000 songs he felt defined his life. He’s moved it to Spotify, where he still adds songs as they come up. It’s about 1500 songs now, and it covers music from different continents, genres, and decades.
DJ Sets and “Track ID” playlists: Whether it’s under the Caribou or Daphni moniker, Snaith is one of my favorite DJs. I listen to their 2020 BBC Essential mix any time I need to focus for an hour or so, and after scores of relistens, it still hits the same. He also periodically updates his Spotify “track ID” playlist for the dance music he’s excited about.
Speaking of two decades, it’s felt like two decades since the last post!
Start Breaking My Heart is an underrated artifact of the electronic aspects of his sound, Andorra and The Milk of Human Kindness build on the psych-pop vein of Up In Flames, Our Love and Suddenly have some of his strongest individual songs. Too many good ones!
“Sizzling” is a good place to start.
No more than 10 tracks, no more than 45 minutes.
If you like this album's trip-hop/breakbeat “folktronica” parts, Koushik’s Out My Window is a jazzier counterpoint to Up In Flames.
You were correct. This was an ideal choice for testing new (old style, but Bluetooth) Sony headphones.