Snaith Completes His Story

In short, “Our Love” is an emotional masterpiece. On the album, Caribou’s Dan Snaith has perfected his own unique sound—melancholic, hypnotic beats designed to emotionally resonate within the listener as much as it would make them dance.

If Caribou’s 2010 release, “Swim,” was designed to make us experience heartbreak, “Our Love” is its direct successor—we are overcoming that feeling of loneliness found in the lead single off of “Swim,” “Odessa”: “She's tired of cryin' and sick of his lies / She's suffered him for far too many years of her life.” Instead, on “Our Love,” we are given the sequential tale of redemption and find closure. Yet this tale of closure isn’t as satisfying as one would hope; on his latest, Snaith continues to ask the hard-hitting, emotionally decisive questions that he posed on “Swim.” On “Silver,” he pleads, “It doesn't mean I can't get over her / Where you gonna go without me tonight? / Don't you know what that means to me?”

But thematically, “Our Love” begins where “Swim” left off. On 2011’s “Leave House,” Snaith expressed how he feels about his counterpart’s inability to reciprocate feelings for him, wailing, "She can't see how / It can make her happy / And I can see / She's says she's gone forward." But on “Our Love,” in an appropriately titled “Back Home,” Snaith now expresses new feelings of indignity and sings in response, “I can't take it / The way you treat me wrong / It's not right girl / There's something going on.” On “Our Love,” we see a Snaith who no longer focuses on the hardships of his life; instead, he focuses on his ability to come out stronger from these experiences. In the last couple of years, Snaith has undergone many difficult experiences, ascribing the underlying to his album to many personal losses. Dan Snaith writes, “I have friends who are struggling to keep their relationships together, I’ve lost people close to me; in fact, one of the songs on the album is dedicated to our sound engineer, who passed away in the final months of making the record.” But throughout it all, the music on “Our Love” remains euphoric and joyous as ever, a mark of celebration of Snaith’s ability to find positivity in his experiences.

By the final track on “Our Love,” “Your Love Will Set You Free,” Snaith no longer lingers in the deep, dark crevices of his love. Amidst heart-throbbing basslines, funky guitar licks, and a jazzy, Latin-influenced synth melody, Snaith confides, “You are here beside me in my bedroom / All night dear / Hold each other like I never met you / Your love will set you free.” He seems to know that his love for others will never end, even if the love will never be reciprocated in his favor.

Ultimately, Caribou’s latest is a relatable album. After a thorough listen-through of “Our Love,” one can’t help but feel that Dan Snaith is undergoing something that we have all felt at some point in our own lives. He finds closure not in the end of a relationship but in the realization that humans are destined to forever love and cherish the experience of a relationship—even if it means going back to the ones we have just lost. It’s not something easy to admit.

With “Our Love,” Snaith expresses his honesty through some of the most danceable, grooviest beats and rhythms of his whole career, enough to leave a casual listener without any notion of some of his most open, expressive work. It’s hard to capture the deep emotional themes of the album when being compelled to dance to an array of hypnotic rhythms from two-step garage beats on “Julia Brightly” to a half-time, trip-hop influenced “Dive” to the title track “Our Love,” a synthpop anthem driven by mountainous layers of acid house synths and drum patterns.

But “Our Love,” despite its deep and melancholic production, still manages to provide us with a rich, euphoric message of passion. In his pursuit of love, Dan Snaith remains reserved, subtle, and soulful in his music. On the album’s spellbinding opener, “Can’t Do without You,” Dan Snaith’s vocals echo the track’s title over and over, a testament to his inability to let go of love. In an interview earlier this year, he addressed his thoughts on what love is: “It's functional and dysfunctional at the same time.” Snaith has come to accept the irrationality of love, remarking on “Our Love” that the sooner we all come to accept love for what it is, the sooner we will all be set free.