Caribou: Andorra
The latest album from Canadian home-recording whiz Dan Snaith and his makeshift band Caribou starts with the danceable "Melody Day," which sounds like it was built from '60s movie soundtracks. But by the end of Andorra, "melody" is far from Snaith's mind: The disc is front-loaded with tightly structured dream-pop that draws heavily on Snaith's pretty, breathy voice and his flair for shuffling together percussive elements into something bracingly hypnotic. Later, Caribou goes for Beatles-style avant-garde psychedelia, processing the sound of a thousand orchestras into trippy cacophony. It's hard to tell what's sampled and what's real on Andorra, which is partly the point. In its journey from form to formlessness, the record feels like Caribou reaching back toward a primordial pool of sound.