Ever since Beethoven dismissed the newly invented metronome – “Whoever has the right feeling, needs none” – musicians have reacted against the advent of technology. The Musicians’ Union voiced alarm when Wurlitzer organs became appended with a drum machine in 1959, calling it a “stilted and unimaginative performer” – but today, drummers are still in a job while music from rap to techno has blossomed thanks to that very technology.
There’s still plenty of concern about the newest wheeze, however: AI. Big software companies such as Adobe are creating tools where a mere text prompt can produce a piece of music. Or what if you can’t sing and don’t want to pay someone who can? Don’t worry! Numerous AI services online will take your lyrics and sing them for you in convincing simulacra of various human voices. Professional vocalists might wince at the new album from Caribou, Canada-born Dan Snaith, populated as it is with multiple ersatz AI singers – all of them altered versions of Snaith’s own voice.
Rather like his friend Kieran Hebden (AKA Four Tet), Snaith has had a pleasingly Benjamin Button-ish career, starting out with spirited yet bucolic psychedelia before getting ever more youthful and dancefloor-orientated, bringing in techno, house and trip-hop (and starting a purely club-facing project, Daphni). Now, aged 46, he’s delivered his most banging album yet. Honey cocks an ear to the last 20 years or so of club music in his adopted city of London, chiefly speed garage, house and the emo-tech of the Bicep and Fred Again generation.
For Honey, Snaith felt limited by his singing voice, and wanted to broaden his range of creative expression: a laudable aim. He could have sampled other artists, as he did on previous album Suddenly, but he can’t make them sing his tunes, so he manipulated his vocals via various software services that provide licensed AI voices (so someone somewhere is presumably getting paid). The AI, Snaith claims, “still captures all the phrasing, the pitch imperfections, the delivery, the breath”.
On one level, it’s just another instrument or effect – like a next-gen Auto-Tune – and quite innocent. Some might find it a little weird for Snaith to turn himself into cutesy young women on Broke My Heart, Do Without You and Come Find Me, but these tracks are done with a certain amount of knowing wit and absurdity, and girl-Snaith sounds great on the latter: Honey’s strongest track, with an earwormingly rhythmic vocal hook.
But it’s much more dubious to turn himself into a rapper on Campfire. A white MC would arguably use the same intonation and accent used here, but Snaith is perilously close to appropriating and imitating Black artistry – if he rapped this way on stage, it would certainly be cringe and probably be offensive. And as the album’s other highlight Over Now shows, Snaith’s own voice – appealingly shaky, naive and human – already has so much expressive potential, its melancholy pitched perfectly against cheesy high-tempo synthwave. The AI feels dismal in comparison, another part of our atomised, anti-communal digital culture; if Snaith had wanted rappers or female singers to enrich his music, wouldn’t it have been better to ask some? (For a more profound and genuinely collaborative mix of human and algorithm, look to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s choral work The Call, which opens at London’s Serpentine gallery this week, and which was made with UK community choirs alongside AI.)
More creative input might have helped Snaith in other ways: he is really losing his facility with melody. Not only does opener Broke My Heart boringly approximate PinkPantheress-type UKG, its central melody is a limp tweak to Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner chorus without any of its cleverness or dark symmetry. The psychedelic-Italo whirl of Climbing might have been transportive if its tune didn’t sound like it had been composed with two fingers in fewer minutes.
The more rhythm-led tracks are also imitative of other, better ones. The speed garage bass on the title track wobbles stiffly – further undermined by the plodding almost-groove, and synth stabs arranged in an overused house rhythm. On Volume, Snaith heavily samples a hip-house ur-text in Marrs’ Pump Up the Volume, but he can’t do anything new with it, and flattens the original’s alien dynamics (and here, as well as on Dear Life, the influence of one of the defining 00s dance tracks feels all too evident: the James Holden remix of Nathan Fake’s The Sky Was Pink).
As each Caribou project goes by, it’s clear that 2010’s Swim – where his pre- and post-club eras lolloped into each other – is by some distance his greatest. Both genuinely psychedelic and genuinely funky, tracks like Odessa and Kaili were quantised but loose; today, Honey’s tracks still have his sense of starry-eyed romance, but are hemmed into a much neater and more familiar grid. AI can hypothetically be a fascinating creative partner, but when the human creativity is as limited as it is here, it’s given little to work with.
• Alexis Petridis is away
