Suddenly

Over the past decade, Caribou has been whittling down his music. Dan Snaith songs were once a constant swirl of brightly colored baubles, as pleasingly jumbled as the view through a kaleidoscope. With 2010�۪s Swim, the muddle began coming into focus. The melodies were brighter, the beats more direct. Things got sharper still on 2014�۪s Our Love, which filtered the pleasures and anxieties of domesticity through the prism of house music at its most ebullient. That simple title spoke to Snaith growing interest in getting at the essence of things. The emotions he was grappling with were complicated���in interviews, he spoke eloquently about the trials of marriage and fatherhood���but he had a way of framing messy feelings in bold strokes. The album�۪s biggest song, ���Can�۪t Do Without You,�۝ featured few lyrics save its titular refrain, repeated over and over, turning its ambiguous double negative into a mantra-like affirmation.

Suddenly��is more stylistically varied than��Our Love��or��Swim, but it�۪s also the most direct that Snaith has sounded. Many of its standout songs are just two or three minutes long, perfect models of pop economy. The anthems are punchier: The dusty boom-bap of ���Home�۝ is the platonic ideal of a rare-groove edit, ���Never Come Back�۝ the epitome of a piano-house barnstormer. There�۪s nothing generic about even his most exacting genre studies: A Caribou song will always sound first and foremost like a Caribou song, thanks in part to Snaith�۪s distinctive falsetto, which graces every song here. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.

Credit: Philip Sherburneat Pitchfork