Cloudy

There is a change of register when "Cloudy" arrives in the Jiaolong sequence, a deliberate step back from percussive urgency into something more diffuse and atmospheric. The track is built around billowing synthesizer textures that move slowly, like weather rather than machinery, their shapes changing gradually enough that you begin to lose track of where one sound ends and another begins. The harmonic language is ambiguous — not quite minor, not quite major — hovering in tonal uncertainty that carries emotional content without specifying it: you feel something, but the feeling resists easy naming. This is a quality Snaith has cultivated throughout his work as Caribou as well, this ability to make sound feel physically present, to suggest space and volume through the arrangement of timbres rather than through narrative. "Cloudy" is less a track to dance to than to drift inside, head tilted slightly back, eyes unfocused, the body still while the mind moves. The percussion present is muted, distant, more like the suggestion of pulse than its assertion. In this way the track functions as a kind of palate cleanser within the album, slowing the heart rate, diffusing the intensity that preceded it, and creating necessary contrast that makes the denser tracks feel more urgent when they return.