Demob Happy

Who put the fire out?

6/10

Manitoba’s follow up to Up in Flames, in the new guise of Caribou (owing to a bizarre lawsuit over copyright infringement) lacks the vivacity and capacity to suprise of its predecessor. Its largely tepid, plodding stuff, replete with the same swirling (but now overfamiliar) psychedelics and drum breaks but refusing to buck your expectations with some genuine innovation. Dan Snaith adds a Krautrock influence to his list of references but makes his debt to DJ Shadow more obvious on this album, preferring the structures (or constraints) of instrumental hip hop to electronica. All and all this amounts to fairly pleasurable listening but there isn’t a moment where I felt I genuinely surprised by this album, and I felt a little cheated that at least three of the 11 tracks listed are mere one and a half minute doodles (not least because two of these feature loops of great potential and should have been fleshed out properly). ‘Yeti’, the single, takes a gamble and pushes Snaith’s bland vocals higher up in the mix than we experienced on Up in Flames, while ‘A Final Warning’ strums and pulses and surges for seven minutes plus. ‘Bees’ is a charming slice of 60s-style folk pop while ‘Pelican Narrows’ aims somewhere between Four Tet and Shadow but misses. ‘Barnowl’ makes a fitting finale with an aural assault worthy of Up in Flames but nothing more. All in all, a disappointment.