Caribou - Andorra

Andorra picks up where Milk of Human Kindness left off, its drum blitzes and pastoral freakouts presented caged within the most economy you could expect from that type of rock sprawl: at just nine songs, it's filler-free. The back-to-back opening of "Melody Day" into "Sandy," all beach-bummed and smashing cymbals, is like a more twee Dungen; or a more masculine Beach Boys. "After Hours" follows with creepy baroque reminiscent of Olivia Tremor Control before pulling the wild card of "SheÕs the One;" with guest vocals by Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, it's a lo-fi take on that group's sunny brand of melancholia.

Then things really start cooking. "Desiree" sounds like an alternate version of a classic pop song nobody's ever heard. Its gutted arrangement leaves Snaith's elegant vocal suspended in a tapestry of sampled string fragments and sounds like the deconstruction George Martin gave the Beatles' catalog on last year's Love. "Eli," and "Sundialing," too, come prepackaged with the feel of revision, as if Four Tet were remixing any flower child anthem by Jefferson Airplane. Closers "Irene" and "Niobe" are Andorra's most sublime moments. The former buries an ambitious song under the '70s PBS warble of a "Sesame Street" slow-jam; the latter under space-aged Vangelis synths and gorgeous bubbles of stretched tape loops that keep falling out of synch.

Andorra's packaging is a rare instance of abstract art direction that actually applies to the content. The cover features a bouquet of plasticware spray-painted yellow and framed by a woodsy backdrop. An inner panel shows Christmas bulbs hooked and hanging from a wool sweater. What these images both convey is the Christmas-tree effect of Andorra's sonic contrast. Snaith takes the organic, prickly, and full-bodied kraut-rock of the last two records and wraps it like an evergreen in small digital bursts of popping, ornamental overdubs. And it employs the big-bang theory of sequencing that David Bowie used on his classic Low: Andorra explodes from a point of density, putting its tightest song structures and sharpest hooks first, before expanding into more spacious galaxies of experimental arrangements.

If you think those mixed metaphors are a bit much, they're nothing compared to the textural collision in Andorra's mix, which sounds at times as if it was recorded in a soup can. And this is the album's only hint of a flaw. The narrow wall-of-midrange that once lent definition to the wild, cornucopian Spector-visions of the mono age now seems like laziness in a surround-sound world; a betrayal of the music's potential scope.

Snaith is somewhat part of an increasing trend of artists like Fog and Matthew Dear who are bored with the limits of their laptop and anxious to step out from behind the programming. But of course, his metamorphosis was a lot more drastic than either of those examples. With the glittery Andorra featuring his best writing and singing yet, and now capping a triple-threat of excellence, he continues to prove that stepping into the light was the right move to make.