Tour CD 2005

A tour souvenir sold only at shows falls somewhere between a fan club release and a B-side. It\'s an opportunity to reward the people who bothered to show up, and a chance to put out music that one wouldn\'t necessarily want to keep in the catalog or worry about distributing through more traditional channels. Dan Snaith\'s Caribou is currently winding across North America (definitely worth checking out, by the way) and they\'ve brought with them this odd little object, which combines a lengthy DJ mix by Snaith with six The Milk of Human Kindness outtakes. On a DJ set by a songwriter the tendency it to listen for influence, to see if he\'ll tip his hand and I\'ll catch a nicked drum beat or appropriated chord change. Snaith\'s mix doesn\'t exactly deliver in that regard, but it does explain why he was fated to break away from the melancholy, Warp-influenced electronica of his debut. Among other things, his mix contains obscure pop from the 1960s and 70s, outsized songs with big voices delivering direct statements, and it\'s difficult to see how such obsessions could lead one down the introspective path of Start Breaking Your Heart. It\'s a diverse mix, though, and in addition to pop nuggets from the Zombies, he tosses in jazz (Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane), proggy instrumentals, 80s Euro-disco, rare groove funk, and some solo steel string guitar. The arc of the set generally is rather flat, offering a sampling of interesting sounds rather than building or moving in any particular direction, more along the lines of 36 minutes of eclectic free form radio. The six new songs are a tribute to Snaith\'s editing abilities with albums proper. Though they tread similar stylistic ground, these tracks are nowhere near as developed as the material that wound up on The Milk of Human Kindness, so you\'ll hear loud echoes of tracks that made the final cut while understanding why these were left behind. \"Bloody Murder\" goes hard on the dramatic piano tone used to great effect on \"Pelican Narrows\", pounding the tense mood imparted by the refrain into the ground, but this feels like a fragment of an idea that just hangs in the air. \"The Snow Capes\" has a splashy drum pattern (Snaith loves his crash cymbal, and we love him for it) with a cyclical keyboard melody that, repetitive as it is, would work better as a short interlude. \"Medium Sized Working Dog (Steady Steady)\" feels more complete, sharing the interlaced guitar/drum motorik groove with \"Bees\" and \"Yeti\" before veering off into Moog-ed out psych during its break. Though it overlaps too closely with the best tracks on The Milk of Human Kindness, \"Medium Sized Working Dog (Steady Steady)\" could stand on its own. The tracks that moves furthest afield from TMOHK are the three-minute drone \"Raspberries\", which swirls together various keyboards and oscillators into an unsatisfying approximation of a Boredoms space filler, and the wistful closer \"Sinuses\", which sounds like a Start Breaking Your Heart B-side and shows that Snaith could still bring the pastoral IDM if he were so inclined. Even if it\'s a bit light on standalone pleasures, Tour CD 2005 is instructive, showing where Snaith comes from while fleshing out the story his last record. — Mark Richardson, May 19, 2005