SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: CARIBOU – HONEY

CARIBOU
HONEY
MERGE RECORDS

There’s no need to make an album review a statement about the threat of AI, but at risk of being hypocritical there’s no way to discuss Caribou’s latest release unless a statement is made.

Here’s the thing—what’s the ultimate different between AI-enhanced vocals in electronic and a vocoder or any other device that artificially changes an artist’s voice. If we were going to rise up against the Vocoder, we would have done it by now. It would have been totally warranted. The infernal device been responsible for some of the worst trends in popular music over the last decade. But this is not exactly that; and this certainly isn’t the place for the theoretical slippery slope conversation. The conversation must be had as one production-quality component and not abstractly with [waves hands around] vaguely purposeful talking points.

Dan Snaith’s first record in four years, he takes his Caribou project in yet another new direction. As if you weren’t prepared to read that Caribou has again jettisoned an old sound for a new old sound. Snaith’s been assembling aural scrapbook collages since the early 2000s when (pre-lawsuit) he was known as Manitoba; his totality could be marked by a Venn diagram of overlapping eras and styles with each record a different misshapen bubble of limber production and clinical dopamine release, gradually slipping into the future.

Through 2007’s Andorra, he planted a flag in 1960s pop and AM radio pleasures. The Beach Boys and The Mamas & The Papas. He ultimately discovered psychedelia and funk, mind expansion and tribal literacy. On 2020’s Suddenly, Snaith stepped out from behind his influences and confronted the expanse, telling personal stories and indulging his lyricism—a storytelling strength that had sought cover behind his production quality like an uneasy teenager that wants to blend into the wallpaper. Suddenly wasn’t a reinvention as much as a realization of personal potential. Tighter and more personal, as if he’d been chiseling away the pop artifice for more than a decade. It just didn’t have that catchy single to play endlessly on college radio.

For Honey, Snaith brought out a new piece of wood. It’s a hunk of tree from the 1990s and 2000s found somewhere along the Italian and French border. Maybe in a discotheque. The whittling metaphor officially overstayed its welcome.

Cutesy girl AI vocalist Snaith appears on the very first track, “Broke My Heart,” a proper club thumper that seems to revel in its familiarity. We’ve heard this track dozens of times before and his choice to AI-enhance his voice into something totally other rather than use samples or even a guest vocalist feels self-indulgent. This need to experiment, manifesting as Snaith but not Snaith when another voice may have been exactly what the track needed. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should—or shouldn’t for that matter. That’s the doubled edge of this conversation. It’s ultimately inconsequential to the appreciation of the song.

It becomes less inconsequential on “Campfire” where an issue of appropriation emerges. On this AI conversation, Snaith tests his mettle as a rapper, and while a white rapper theoretically could emerge with this style and intonation, he’s breaching an unspoken rule of etiquette. He can’t rap like this. The same question applies. Does it matter? Does the listener’s answer to the question change when the AI affectation crosses racial lines? AI MC Snaith shouldn’t have been given the microphone; in this instance he’s distracting from the production by sounding like a white guy aping and fabricating a cut-rate Kendrick Lamar. If he wanted a rapper, he should have employed one. Even electronic music leads us back to the heart of every argument against the use of AI in the creative process.

And yet, there’s plenty to enjoy outside arguing, fist-clenched in combat with the future. “Campfire” segues into “Climbing,” an upbeat Italo-disco rejiggering of an M83 track and ultimately lands on one of the albums highlights, “Only You,” a hearty reminder that Snaith’s human and fragile vocals provide more depth than his AI alter-egos. It’s the single greatest testament to why this album lacks the soul of its predecessors despite being a serviceable and largely enjoyable listen as he winds and spins its central motifs throughout Honey. It even survives a near verbatim rehash of M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume.”

While this album will receive plenty of immediate airtime for the synthy and fresh single “Come Find Me,” it seems unlikely to stir the populace, to linger on turntables in the way that Andorra or Swim continued to reveal layers and depth. Like much of the music Snaith has reconstituted for Honey, it’s fleeting and ephemeral; no quantity of artificial Snaiths can truly convey the soul of the real one.   

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