Early arrivals at this first of a four-night run are handed cardboard masks featuring composer and chief Caribou Dan Snaith’s face, blown up to three times its usual size. For many, it’s as close as they’ll get to glimpsing the unassuming Canadian maths boffin tonight, dry ice and a remarkably low stage hiding him and his bandmates from view. This absence of a visual focus – plus the venue’s steamy sweatbox ambience – conjure an atmosphere less gig and more club night: perfect for Snaith’s strong pivot towards the dancefloor on new album Honey.
It’s the latest evolutionary step for Caribou, who have previously cycled through blissful dream-pop, cerebral electronica, and sadface R&B confessions. Tonight offers glimpses of Snaith’s more wildcard phases: mesmeric, psychedelic krautrock epic Sun; the gamelan-clanging space-funk of Bowls. The lion’s share of the set focuses on new material, however, which takes a more direct route to dancefloor nirvana, one Snaith has been signalling since 2014’s Our Love and his releases as side-project Daphni.
Opener Volume sets the mood, reimagining MARRS’ Pump Up the Volume as raw house banger, establishing a vibe the subsequent tracks build on like a masterful DJ set. Snaith unabashedly amps up the pop that has always underpinned Caribou: Come Find Me drives its simple riff and haunting vocal hook somewhere emotionally satisfying, while Over Now recycles synths from 80s power ballads into gloriously tear-stained hi-NRG, and Broke My Heart, a collab with Kieran Hebden, matches two-step shuffle to fractured vocal sample and a playful nod to Suzanne Vega’s clubland crossover Tom’s Diner.
But while some new tracks have been polished to a Guetta-esque sheen (all the better to slip, Trojan horse-like, into the playlists of high-street clothing shops), there’s nothing impersonal about Caribou’s turn to mainstream pop. Even if we can’t see him, Snaith sings every note, electronically transforming himself into the eroticised angel crooning throughout Dear Life, the pitched-up gospel singer stirring up the Moroder-esque euphoria of Got to Change. And his shift to pop suits his yearning songcraft perfectly, the melancholy heart of Caribou no less affecting when tethered to 4/4 orthodoxy and following the shortest laser-guided path to the arms-aloft chorus.
