September 21 2007
Caribou — Andorra
posted by Steven Shaw at 3:38 pm
Caribou Andorra
Scatter a few cushions down and get ready for a modern psychedelic classic.
Andorra, by Canadian Dan Snaith, who goes under the moniker of Caribou, is full of swirling flutes, bleeps and squeaks, crashing rhythms and many layered tracks of vocals that occasionally threaten to sound like The Alan Parsons Project.
Okay he doesn’t exactly sound like Parsons. He’s not quite that proggy. But on “She’s The One” his vocals occupy the same high register as Brian Wilson or The Polyphonic Spree’s Tim DeLaughter. The songs are softly sung and quite regimented, complementary to the mechanical, almost Krautrock rhythms.
Andorra reminds me of West Coast psychedelic group The Chocolate Watch Band and it’s not too far from The Zombies either.
It’s down to those generated flutes that make me wanna run through the long grass, the Yo La Tengo drones (“After Hours”) the Tomorrow Never Knows drumming (“Sandy”), the layers of verb-soaked vocals and sleigh bells and cymbals that hardly ever stop crashing. In short, it’s the perfect musical bed for an acid-trip film sequence.
Check out where he gets his influences from in this BBC Collective doco , or watch the video for “Melody Day”, below.