【搬运译】叉婊Pitchfork评Caribou 2020年专辑《Suddenly》
搬运自：网易云音乐专栏【Music Online Zine Courier】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：豆目豆科
Dan Snaith’s latest is as sly and layered as ever, but he finds ways to be more direct with his songwriting. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.
Dan Snaith 的最新作品一如既往地狡猾千面，同时他找到了更为直接地创作途径。没有零散流浪的音符、没有多余的动作、没有难以触及的频谱狭缝。
Over the past decade, Caribou has been whittling down his music. Dan Snaith’s songs were once a constant swirl of brightly colored baubles, as pleasingly jumbled as the view through a kaleidoscope. With 2010’s Swim, the muddle began coming into focus. The melodies were brighter, the beats more direct. Things got sharper still on 2014’s Our Love, which filtered the pleasures and anxieties of domesticity through the prism of house music at its most ebullient. That simple title spoke to Snaith’s growing interest in getting at the essence of things. The emotions he was grappling with were complicated—in interviews, he spoke eloquently about the trials of marriage and fatherhood—but he had a way of framing messy feelings in bold strokes. The album’s biggest song, “Can’t Do Without You,” featured few lyrics save its titular refrain, repeated over and over, turning its ambiguous double negative into a mantra-like affirmation.
在过去的十年间，Caribou 一直在精简他的音乐。Dan Snaith 的歌曲曾经是一个个不断旋转、色彩缤纷的小玩意儿，就像透过万花筒所看到的那令人愉悦的混沌景象。随着2010年《Swim》的发行，这些混沌渐渐汇集——旋律愈加明亮、节拍更加直接。在2014年的《Our Love》中，事物变得愈加尖锐，它们穿透最热情洋溢的 House Music 棱镜，分离过滤出家庭生活中快乐与焦虑并存之态。这一简单的标题便说明了 Snaith 愈加衷于触及事物本质。他正努力应对的情感是复杂的——在采访中，他滔滔不绝地讲述了婚姻和身为人父的艰辛——但他仍掌握有一法门，用大胆的笔触重构收束混乱的情绪。这张专辑中最热门的歌曲 “Can't Do Without You” 除了标题外便不再有其他歌词，一遍又一遍地重复下，将其模糊的双重否定句式化为咒语般深入人心的决心之语。
Suddenly is more stylistically varied than Our Love or Swim, but it’s also the most direct that Snaith has sounded. Many of its standout songs are just two or three minutes long, perfect models of pop economy. The anthems are punchier: The dusty boom-bap of “Home” is the platonic ideal of a rare-groove edit, “Never Come Back” the epitome of a piano-house barnstormer. There’s nothing generic about even his most exacting genre studies: A Caribou song will always sound first and foremost like a Caribou song, thanks in part to Snaith’s distinctive falsetto, which graces every song here. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.
《Suddenly》在风格上比《Our Love》或《Swim》更加多样，但同时它也是 Snaith 听感上最为直白的作品。它中许多热门歌曲仅仅时长两三分钟，是流行音乐市场下的完美典范。歌曲更富震撼力：“Home” 那充满尘世感的轰鸣声将是极为罕见的完美之笔，而 “Never Come Back” 则是钢琴屋酒吧老板的绝妙剪影。即使是他最为严格的流派研究也并无通用之处：Caribou 的歌曲之所以听起来首先知晓是 Caribou 所为，这部分要归功于 Snaith 独特的假声，他的假声在这张专辑的每一首歌曲中均有体现。这里不再有零散流浪的音符、不再有多余的动作、不再有难以触及的频谱狭缝。
Snaith’s beat-making has gotten more adventurous, too. He flits between rock, trap, UK garage, disco, and more, sometimes touching on two or three styles in the course of a single song. His drums are sharp and every hi-hat and cowbell is rendered in crisp hi-def and seems to hover in mid-air, like a 3D image. In this heady precision, Suddenly can be an almost dizzying listen. Caribou’s music has never leaped from the speakers quite the way it does here.
Snaith 的鼓点制作也变得愈加冒险。他在 Rock、trap、UK Garage 以及 Disco 等等音乐流派之间游走，甚至有时会在一首歌曲中运用两三种风格。他的鼓声尖锐而清晰，每一个 hi-hat 和牛铃声都是高清渲染，于半空中全方位旋转呈现，好似一个3D图像一般栩栩如生。在这种令人陶醉的精确呈现中，《Suddenly》可以给人以一种几乎令人晕厥的听感，Caribou 的音乐从未如此这般将要从扬声器中一跃而出，直逼耳廓。
That outward clarity masks the growth in Caribou’s songwriting. Snaith has rarely been a strictly autobiographical lyricist, but not all of Our Love’s tales were as elegant as “Can’t Do Without You”. He has said that he’s the kind of person who might not know the lyrics to his favorite song, and on Our Love, you could tell. The lyrics felt more like placeholders, cue points where listeners might project their own more detailed experiences. Suddenly follows a period of turmoil in his extended family—a string of death, divorce, and other assorted shrapnel that falls within the blast radius of middle age—and, coincidentally or no, his writing has improved greatly. The stories he’s telling feel more substantial, as does his ability to assume the voices of a wider cast of characters. He still has a hard time resisting the pull of an easy couplet; the album is peppered with rhymes like “know” and “grow,” “in the past” and “here to last.” But he tends to use his voice as just another source of tone color. It is, truly, a lovely instrument, as limpid and azure as the photograph of water on the album’s cover.
这种外在的清明却掩盖了 Caribou 在歌曲创作上的成长。Snaith 很少作为一个严格意义上的自传体词作家，但同时并非所有《Our Love》中的故事都同 “Can't Do Without You”一般优雅。他曾说过，他是那种甚至不知道自己最喜欢歌曲歌词的人，这一点在《Our Love》中可见一斑。歌词在她的作品中更像是定位点，是听众得以投射自身经历的提示条。突然间（Suddenly），他美好的家庭生活出现一段动荡期——一连串的生离死别以及其他在“中年爆炸半径内的无数弹片”——无论是不是巧合，他的创作也随之发生巨大的改变——他所讲述的故事愈加充实，他为更多人物代言的能力也愈发纯青。他仍然难以抗拒一些简单对仗的吸引力；这张专辑充斥了诸如 “Know” 之于 “Grow”、“in the past” 之于 “here to last” 这样的韵文。但他倾向于把他的声音作为另一器乐音的来源，它确为一个可爱的工具，就像专辑封面中所呈现的水波图像一样清澈湛蓝。
Snaith’s principal strength remains his skill as a musician and producer. He’s got hooks for days, and you could heat a single-family home by the warmth of his chord progressions. Virtually every song has some little detail that makes you lean in closer. There’s a marvelous moment in the opening “Sister,” in which the synthesizer detunes by just a few cents, almost imperceptibly, just enough to change the temperature in the room. “Like I Loved You” features a rippling jazz-guitar solo from Colin Fisher, the album’s only guest musician, that rolls like marbles on the deck of a boat.
Snaith 的主要优势仍然是他同时作为音乐家和制作人所掌握的精湛技能。他早已能熟练绘出歌曲之中的高亮一笔，你甚至可以用他温馨的和弦进程来加热你一人独处时的冷清屋舍；也几乎每首歌都有些引人入胜的小细节。在开篇的 “Sister” 中，有一奇妙时刻，合成器仅仅略微改变分寸，几乎难以察觉，却足以改变房间的温度。“Like I Loved You” 中，专辑中唯一的客座音乐家 Colin Fisher 的爵士吉他独奏波澜起伏，好似甲板上滚动往复的弹珠。
In “Sunny’s Time,” tape-warp effects give the song’s central piano melody the texture of shirred silk, while a gruff hip-hop sample is chopped to ribbons and filtered in a way that accentuates the grain of the rapper’s voice, which is rendered all but unintelligible. It’s a fresh, surprising choice: Producers have been cribbing funk breaks like the one Snaith grabs for “Home” for decades. But by zeroing in on that gravelly vocal texture, “Sunny’s Time” gives Suddenly the feel of being in conversation with mainstream popular music—or eavesdropping on it, anyway.
在 “Sunny's Time” 中，磁带卷曲的音效使歌曲中夹杂的钢琴的旋律极具丝绸般柔顺的质感；而粗犷的 Hip-Hop 采样被分割成缕缕丝条，并以一种突出说唱者声音纹理的方式进行精滤，而彻底使之声音变得琢磨不透。这不可谓不是一个新鲜、令人惊异的选择：近几十年来，许多制作人都选择去仿制 Snaith 为 “Home” 所创作的那种放克音乐。但是，通过定位这种沙哑的人声质地，“Sunny's Time” 为《Suddenly》带来一种与主流流行音乐对话的错觉——或者说是在窥视它。
Listen through enough times, and you may think you hear more songs than are listed on the sleeve. Time and again, songs feint left in their final minute or two. “New Jade,” a kind of psychedelic, maximalist R&B, suddenly flips into a gothic snippet of synth and flanged guitar, like something off the Cure’s 1980 album Seventeen Seconds. The chunky soul of “Home” gives way to fingerpicked folk guitar. And “Lime,” a jazzy house tune in the vein of Theo Parrish, abruptly stops and cuts to a much slower sample of Black Soul’s “The Sphynx,” a dirge-like meditation from 1975. This collage-like construction most likely reflects the way the record came together: Snaith has said that in the five years since Our Love, he amassed an archive of 900 loops and sketches, the products of his daily studio practice. The stragglers that seem to have snuck in here, under cover of the completed songs, are a big part of the record’s charm: They enliven the mood and keep things moving.
在反复欣赏过数遍而饱腹后，你可能会错认为你听到了远比唱片封面所罗列的多得多的歌曲。歌曲一次又一次的在最后一两分钟里佯装离开又再度显现。“New Jade” 这一原本迷幻，极端主义的 R&B，突然转变为哥特式的合成器和镶边吉他切片，就像 the Cure 乐队1980年的专辑《Seventeen Seconds》里的曲目。“Home” 厚重的灵魂乐元素让位给指弹民谣吉他音；而 “Lime”，一首与 Theo Parrish 相似的爵士乐曲，则会突然暂停切入 Black Soul “The Sphynx” 这首1975年充斥着哀伤情调的冥想曲放慢数倍后的采样片段。 这种拼贴式的乐曲结构很可能反映了唱片的制作过程：Snaith 说，在《Our Love》之后的五年间，他积累了近千个片段和草样，这些都是他日常录音室练习的产物。在已完成的歌曲的遮掩下，这些零散其中的东西便是这张唱片的魅力所在——它们活跃了平淡的音轨，使事物愈加开阔、无尽延伸。
All these trap doors sometimes give the impression that there’s another album hiding in the shadows of Suddenly, like those vinyl records that have a secret track carved between the grooves of another song. It can be tempting to wonder what that hypothetical album might have sounded like, and where Snaith might have wandered had he given free rein to his experimental instincts. The mood throughout is so sweet, the harmonies so reassuringly consonant, that I occasionally long for a little more discord. In paring back, it sometimes feels like Snaith is holding back; I miss the occasional overload of Swim, where Caribou’s newfound discipline gave way to his psychedelic second nature, and it felt as if the tape couldn’t take all the input that he was throwing at it.
所有这些暗道、陷阱都给人以一种“在《Suddenly》的暗影之中隐藏着另一张专辑——就像在某首歌曲的音轨凹槽之间刻有秘密音乐的黑胶唱片”的感觉。我们显然很想知晓那张遐想专辑的真正模样，如果 Snaith 能够自如地发挥他的实验本能，他又可能会飘荡到何处。整张专辑的情绪是如此的甜美，和声又有着如此令人安心的和谐，以至于我偶尔还会渴望多一点不和谐。在精简的过程中，有时感觉 Snaith 在忍气吞声；我怀念《Swim》偶尔的要素过载，Caribou 新发掘的铁律让位于他那迷幻的第二天性，感觉好像磁带将无法承受他的全套输入。
Suddenly, in contrast, is almost all business—with a few salient exceptions, the most moving of which comes right at the end. Album closer “Cloud Song” begins as a meditation for voice and but it builds and builds—layers accruing, waveforms morphing, harmonies slipping out of tune. “I’m broken, so tired of crying/Just hold me close to you,” he sings, as a flood of frequencies gushes forth from his electronics. In this brief moment, all the control of the previous 40-odd minutes is washed away. Witnessing Snaith in full command of his talents is gratifying. But this moment where it all threatens to fall apart is what makes his music feel not just relatable but consequential.
相比之下，《Suddenly》几乎所有的业务层——除了一些明显的例外，最感人至深的是专辑的尾声 “Cloud Song” 开篇是作为声音和无伴合成器的冥想曲，但它同时富于变化不断堆叠发展——层层累积，波形扭曲、和声走调。“I’m broken, so tired of crying/Just hold me close to you”他这样唱道，与此同时频率洪流从他的电子设备中喷涌而出。在这短暂的数秒间，先前40多分钟的压抑被尽数冲毁，能目睹 Snaith 完全掌控自己才华是令人欣慰的。正是在这个一切都有可能分崩离析的危险时刻，他的音乐才让人觉得不仅有共鸣，而且足以载入史册。
