Yeti

The mythological creature of the title — elusive, enormous, glimpsed at the edge of known territory — describes this early Caribou track's sonic character precisely. The production has a rawness that later, more polished albums would refine away: drum machines sitting with evident digital grain, synthesizer lines that feel exploratory rather than arrived-at, guitar treated until it barely resembles itself. This is Snaith before his sound fully crystallized, and there's genuine value in the glimpse. The track has the quality of early sketches by an artist who already possesses distinctive vision but hasn't yet learned to control it with perfect precision — which makes it exciting in ways that perfect control sometimes forecloses. You can hear someone genuinely working out what they want to say, finding that the searching is itself the content rather than an obstacle to it. The yeti of the title is also Snaith himself in this early period, a presence large and strange that the music is still in the process of defining. For fans who came to Caribou through Swim or Our Love, these earlier recordings offer archaeological pleasure: the fossil record of a singular artistic personality in formation, unmistakably itself even before it fully arrived.