Live Review: Caribou @ Bowery Ballroom [3.28.08]

Friday night at Bowery Ballroom, Caribou played an understated but manic set for a sold-out crowd. It was a birthday party of sorts, as the prolific music maker and sole genius behind Caribou in its recorded form, Daniel Snaith, turned 30 right before our eyes. Snaith—with bandmates Ryan Smith, Brad Weber, and Andy Lloyd—nearly perfectly recreated his electronic-inflected pop music (or is it pop-inflected electronic music?) in a live setting. The melding of pop and electronic, man and machine, was evident all evening.

Fuck Buttons, the opening band out of the UK, made giant repetitive toy keyboard and synthesizer soundscapes. I enjoyed their music when it was at its most gargantuan and diverse: for instance, the first song of their set, “Sweet Love for Planet Earth,” which began with a small, key-clinking opening that gave way to huge washes of keyboarded distortion and then “vocals” sung through what looked like a fisher price toy cassette recorder microphone. It was fairly blissful noise music. But at other times their repetitive structures didn’t layer together as well, and the music sounded like a cheesy club-beat pulse with processed stuff over top. (Perhaps this is something we can forgive them; they are after all, European.)

Caribou then came on stage and were met with unbridled enthusiasm. The packed crowd, which had remained distant for Fuck Buttons, pushed up to the stage. The psychedelic turn in Snaith’s music—and its unabashed melodicism—have not changed the percussion heavy sound of the band. The stage plot was entirely representative of this: the two drummers (Snaith is one of them) were at the front of the stage, while the bass and guitar languished in the shadows (revenge for drummers after decades of being shoved to the back!). The main drummer, Brad Weber, was—to put it indelicately—insane. Hooked by in-ear headphones to a laptop giving him tempos (so that various samples could be played at the right time during the songs), he looked and sounded like an android. His eyes were always in the time-marking distance, and his body was completely in thrall to the incredible beats and fills he played (was programmed to play?). When Snaith joined the fracas the patterns and crosspatterns threw our bodies and brains all over the place. Amazing. And suddenly I realized that Caribou are secretly math-rock…



But with a heart. The melodies and the bright guitar and keyboard lines kept everyone’s brains from exploding, while Snaith’s quiet vocals created a delicate (and very un-math-rock) warmth and intimacy. The best expression of this was perhaps the band’s performance of “Hello Hammerheads.” Snaith, over a folk-like guitar line and only a small pulse from the drums, liltingly sang “She told me to stay/or go away/and I looked in her eyes/and left her.” Then came a barely-there chorus of harmonized “ohs.” It was a sad, intense song and came across even more so in the midst of all the percussiveness and noise of the evening.




[Words: John Melillo]
[Photos: Adam Weinberg]