Album Review: Caribou - Honey
Label: Merge Records
Released: October 4th, 2024
Genre: Electronica, Indietronica
Tracklist:
01. Broke My Heart
02. Honey
03. Volume
04. Do Without You
05. Come Find Me
06. August 20/24
07. Dear Life
08. Over Now
09. Campfire
10. Climbing
11. Only You
12. Got To Change
Dan Snaith combines Caribou and Daphni for a sometimes confusing yet solid full-length.
Dan Snaith is kind of like the Hannah Montana of electronic music. Since 2004, he’s delivered dreamy indietronica under his Caribou moniker. As Daphni, his dancefloor experiments have moved partygoers starting 2011. Not everyone knows that Caribou is Daphni, or vice versa, which makes Honey the Hannah Montana movie: Snaith is taking off his wig and letting everyone see that he can be both parts.
If you’ve seen Snaith perform in the past year, you might have already heard some of these songs. Not only has he teased them in his Daphni sets, but he’s also played them while DJing as Caribou for the first time in over a decade. I’ve been waiting for “Climbing” and “Got To Change” since I heard the songs earlier this year during a Floating Points back-to-back Daphni set, but I already knew the songs had to be Snaith’s IDs… I just expected them to be part of a new Daphni album. That’s not to say Caribou never puts out dance music tracks; “Never Come Back” and “Ravi” off of his 2020 Suddenly are basically house. Listening to the songs outside of a dancefloor setting, it started to click. “Climbing” contains Caribou’s idiosyncratic soft-spoken vocals and ‘70s funk-filled psychedelia, and “Got To Change” is an emotionally-charged closer that doesn’t always appear on a Daphni project. Maybe the fact that the songs fit so well in the middle of DJ sets says more about his skills as a selector than anything, but I also wouldn’t have bat an eye they were on a Cherry deluxe album.
But it was confusing when the album’s lead single and title track was released and “Honey” was as close to a bass house festival banger as you could get without tipping the line and being corny. It grew on me later on, but at first, I was on the war against RA on the side of RA (It also made more sense knowing that the song was actually arranged by EDM advocate Four Tet). I started losing hope when “Broke My Heart” was the project’s second single, and its high-pitched vocals (also Snaith’s, just manipulated by AI) were grating to my ears. The two songs end up being the first two songs on Honey, and unfortunately, they’re also the album’s weakest point. “Honey” and “Broke My Heart” are the most EDM and pop-leaning, respectively, songs in the LP. Commercialized music can absolutely be with emotion, but these two tracks sound soulless—something I never thought I’d say about something in Caribou’s catalog.
Otherwise, Snaith’s experimentation results in a solid album. With Honey being his 12th, I’m not even mad at his use of AI. In a press release, Snaith called his use of AI “alchemy,” as it transforms his voice “into something that is both mine and not mine.” But I think the word better describes the melding of his two distinctive artist personas. While Honey misses some of the things I love about Caribou and some of the things I love about Daphni, the album combines qualities from both to make twelve tracks that are familiar and new, at the same time. The album may trickily be released under Caribou yet sometimes sound like Daphni, but what’s clear is Honey is undoubtedly Snaith. And if he’s still trying to figure it out after 24 years, so can I.
