Caribou Hypnotizes the City's Least Dance-Friendly Venue

Dan Snaith of Dundas, Ontario has been consistently pumping out ever-changing electronic sounds for over twenty years. Under the name Manitoba, he started out making shifty, sample-heavy dance music in the vein of Four Tet’s early work. After a lawsuit in 2005 (from one Richard “Handsome Dick” Manitoba), he took up the pseudonym Caribou and moved towards the indie dance sound he’s now known for. 

His latest record Honey keeps up with the times, turning his sound towards glitzy, almost hyper-pop adjacent vocal bits and fast-paced drumbeats. It marks another step on his way to being a bigger, cleaner artist, a path he has been on since his 2010 album Swim won him all kinds of awards with its sweet minimal dance pop. 

The show was booked for the Olympia Theatre, and with a lineup out the door, I was prepared to share a room with over a thousand people. Inside it was dark and crowded. Irish garage artist Yunè Pinku was opening on stage in front of heavily psychedelic visuals of dark forests full of twisting tree trunks. It was just her alone up there working a sampler and keyboard. The thumping drum lines she sang over brought a flow to her set, unlike most openers I’ve seen. Her set was astonishingly short as well, hardly giving everybody enough time to show up and start dancing. Only the very front rows had started to move their bodies, I hoped there’d be more dancing to come.

The demographic at the show was one of the most varied I’d ever seen. The people who’d followed Dan’s music since the early days are parents now, and many families with kids lined the crowd’s contour. There were also several groups of younger folks, much more down to dance, spread out evenly across the large, terraced floor. The Olympia is a venue that is hostile to dancing, as most of the floor consists of large stairs downwards to the stage. The chance of tripping and creating a human domino catastrophe was higher than anywhere else in the city. My hopes for a boogie night were shrinking. 

The main act stepped out and I was positively surprised to see more than one person. Caribou tours with a band providing live electric drums, bass and guitar over Dan’s synth pads and vocals. The light shows onstage made me feel like a kid in a candy store. The constant minimal patterns of shapes and contrasting colours complemented the more stripped-back sounds of Caribou’s music. The screen was a constant stream of overlapping, hypnotizing patterns with colliding movements that would speed up and slow down. The band stood as silhouettes in front of it all and looked ethereal when blasts of colour would light up the whole stage from behind. 

Most of the songs they played were off the newest album and older cuts only threw back as far as the 2010 Swim album. To me, this further marks Swim as the turning point in their career towards the simple. I am personally a much bigger fan of their more mind-bending work pre-2007 and was left a little disappointed by the setlist because of that. Shows aren’t tailored for me, however, and this kind of music was still a joy I could shut my mind off to and let the rhythm invade. 

The rhythm could only do so much given the unfortunate venue, and the dancing continued to be reserved for people at the front of the crowd, separated from me by several stairs and whole conglomerates of folks of all kinds. I stood near the center back, with my arms crossed and my neck bouncing to the beat.

They followed the electronic artist trend of playing in 3-5 song bursts with pauses in between. In these pauses they’d let the overhead lights shine on the band, finally showing us their faces. Dan himself kept shaking his hands together as if to say thank you to the crowd. His fortunate smile was straight out of nowhere Ontario, as I’d hoped for. There was some genuine connection to be felt that this artist was himself Canadian and the cheering made that clear.

It felt like no time at all had passed when the lights came on for the last time and he said he had one more song for us. Both the opener and main act delivered bizarrely short performances. In this way, the show did feel a little tailored to me, a lesser fan of this new era of Caribou. Despite my longing for the old days that I’ll never really know, it's enlightening to see the passion of an Ontarian come to such heights, and Dan Snaith is clearly a very grateful man who may never lose the spark to keep redefining his sound.