Caribou

Before some dickhead lawyered up, Caribou (Dan Snaith) used to be known as Manitoba, an artist whose debut, Up in Flames, sculpted the soft white noise of My Bloody Valentine into electronic songs with elaborate Escher-like architecture. The Milk of Human Kindness, the act’s latest effort, perpetually evokes construction analogies for the ways in which Snaith’s songs become skyscrapers of counter-rhythms, with beats layered like a teetering Jenga game and vocals that softly squeeze through the claustrophobic gaps. Part of the fun of listening to Caribou is hearing the back pockets of the music, where you might notice a harp or a video game or some unintended stirring of the ghosts in the machine. Like Mum and Four Tet, Caribou knows how to slip the hive sounds into your bloodstream, bypassing any of electronic music’s sense of alienation and cold mechanization.