Ryan's Caribou Review

Have you ever had the experience of being in a confined space with two people speaking a language that you don't understand? It can be an incredibly frustrating experience, even if you're not trying to pay attention to the conversation. What can be even worse, though, is when those people are speaking a language where you know a few words of it, because you'll inevitably hear those few words that you know, and then you'll end up paying attention to the conversation, 99% of which you don't understand, because that's just the way the human brain works.

That experience was the same one that I had while listening to Caribou's Swim. There were a few things that I recognized here and there – dashes of Daft Punk here and there, and a healthy dose of Underworld's Beaucoup Fish album – but for the most part I just didn't get it.

No doubt that's my fault – I haven't really listened to much electronic music in the better part of a decade, and by not listening to it probably means that I've lost the ability to judge the quality of it, because I'm used to expecting a certain set of things from a song, and the types of things in 'good' electronic music are different from what I expect. But listening in as an outsider, there was really nothing here that pulled me in or interested me. If I had to pick a favourite track on the album it would most likely be the lead track, Odessa, but for the most part I felt like the songs kind of blended together and didn't really stand apart from each other.