Caribou: Swim: Odessa
First came Tomorrow, In A Year by The Knife (which I am utterly incapable of reviewing, in the good sense); then came the news about the new Johanna Newsom Have One On Me album and now Swim by Caribou (release date April 16) – the new music decade is unstoppable and explosively inspiring. The first track off Swim, Odessa gives you with its name firstly the impression of a stasi history reference and Cold War fever, but don’t worry – the track is far away form that feeling and issues. Appropriately, “Odessa”s main reference point is the icy geek disco of Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Erlend Øye (I seriously did a double-take when the vocals came in). Snaith tricks out the sound with ESG-style sound bombs, a little chicken-scratch guitar, clanging polyrhythms playing off a globular bassline, and eventually, a piano cribbed from an early-90s house track that feels right at home. Snaith works with restraint, riding the beat for all its worth and keeping his affect more or less in check. Given “Odessa”s awesomeness, and its clear break from its predecessors, here’s hoping that Snaith is good enough to us to retain at least one trend from Andorra on the forthcoming Swim: a variety of repetitions on this well-chosen theme.
The liquid, alien lead single from Caribou’s upcoming album Swim now has a video that’s equally soft-edged and light. It offers no concrete storyline – just lots of Canadian wintry shots blending into one another, and a woman driving, then walking through the snow, trying to escape. The video is very open to interpretation; it’s evocative but extremely unspecific. To me, it’s like the feeling you get from a smell: undeniably strong but hard to necessarily put into words.
See Caribou live at Berghain on April 28 or visit the tour site for more venues. And watch the video in the end.
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