- Caribou's latest under his dance floor moniker is both expansive and low-key, like at-home sketches of tracks to play on festival main stages.
- Dan Snaith's work as Daphni has always felt like the sketchbook counterpart to Caribou's glorious, full-colour paintings, focused more on edits or loops than fully-fleshed songs, a place where his simplest dance floor ideas could really come alive. "Cherry," the first single from the Daphni's third album, was a great example of the project's unique chemistry, combining the hypnotic repetition of past Daphni tracks with the sound design of Caribou.
Based around an addictive, almost uncomfortably close FM synth, "Cherry" spins and spins like it's trying to make itself dizzy, creating almost unbearable tension that never really lets up. It's a sign of how important DJing and dance floors have become to Snaith, as well as proof that his knack for unusual sounds remains no matter how popular he becomes. It also presented Cherry as, potentially, one of his boldest records yet. The final result is up there, but as it jumps frantically from idea to idea, it dulls the impact of its best ideas in favour of others that might have been best left in a folder along with hundreds of other loops on his laptop.
Most of the tracks on Cherry are notably short—three minutes or less—which lends the LP an infectious and cheery energy that's hard not to get swept up in. The opener "Arrow" is like a house anthem in miniature—a few drum sounds and a vocal hook—and most of the tracks have brisk, snappy drum patterns, like "Take Two," which sounds like a Sound Stream edit of a Sound Stream edit. But after a while, all this flitting to and fro renders the tracks into genre exercises: old-school house on "Clavicle," FloPo-style vamping on "Mana" and, with the extremely pleasant "Cloudy," unimaginative lo-fi house to chill/study to. Like so much of Snaith's work, every sound is polished and pleasing to the ear, sometimes at the expense of the all-important friction you get on a tune like "Cherry."
Still, the album is vibrant and beautifully textured, and the lack of focus also means there are plenty of fun detours, like the wiggly synth of "Crimson" or the sculpted air of "Arp Breaks," moments where the sketch-based approach works the best. Few other producers could make a track as epic and catchy as "Mana" and make it sound effortless, and then get as weird as "Karplus," full of heavily-flanged mechanical ripples and sweeps, finished off with fairy-dust glissandos. The good thing about this almost zany pacing is that if you don't like one of the tracks, you don't have to wait very long for the next one.
When the closer "Fly Away" rolls around, we're treated to one of the LP's best sketches: an ecstatic UK rave anthem with ebullient piano and a rollicking beat. Done this way, in this style, at this time, by an artist as big as Snaith, "Fly Away" could have been a massive summer hit. Here it just kind of flails around for three minutes, never quite catching fire. It's hard not to feel like it was a missed opportunity. But that's just not what Cherry is about. Instead, it's a record where Snaith lets his muse (and his gear) take him down every path that comes to mind—as soon as it comes to mind. The record was made over an extended period of time, but its songs feels like quickfire blasts of inspiration, unfailingly upbeat, weird and even cutesy Listening to Cherry is like listening to Snaith dream up future anthems, giving us teases or blueprints here and there—sometimes tantalizing, sometimes frustrating, but always moving too quickly to get boring.
Tracklist01. Arrow
02. Cherry
03. Always There
04. Crimson
05. Arp Blocks
06. Falling
07. Mania
08. Take Two
09. Mona
10. Clavicle
11. Cloudy
12. Karplus
13. Amber
14. Fly Away