Caribou: "Melody Day"

There's an idea out there that enjoys a certain privilege, vague though it is, that we like to see an artist move inexorably from one idea to the next, to expand on an idea, to make larger. We (and by "we" I mean, uh, me) like to impose the idea, call it progress, call it building. So when Caribou's skipper Dan Snaith dissolves The Milk of Human Kindness's (2005) already focused formula and reduces it down to its essence, it's not just a tidy mechanization of Caribou's blooming psychedelica, it's also a temporary alleviation of that burden of artistic progress, that impulse to stack new sounds on the old.

"Melody Day," for all its unembellished (though perfectly used) old sounds, is refreshing pop. 4/4 snare strokes backbeat nonsensical sentiment -- "Melody day / what have I done?" -- that is nonetheless wholly winning and endlessly hummable, difficult though it is to duplicate given the surprising range of Snaith's falsetto. The signature chaos of dual drummers then erupts from that misleading beat into faraway cymbal wash, a cathartic outburst that sounds like the mysterious alignment of competing oldies stations.

The edges have been sanded away from what was, a long time ago, Manitoba's ambient amorphism. Underneath was an unexpectedly literate contemporization of sixties nostalgia. That contemporization now reduced to its core elements may leave Caribou with fewer places to go in the future, but "Melody Day" remains the sound of an aesthetic left trimmed of excess and thus perfected.