Breaking Artist: Caribou

Who: Dan Snaith, a Canadian-born electro-pop visionary who used to perform under the name Manitoba.

Sounds Like: Folktronica on acid. Caribou's latest album, Andorra, hits like an unearthed gem from the heyday of psychedelic rock with layers of chiming bells, warped strings and trippy flute loops.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. Snaith was forced to ditch his Manitoba moniker when Dictators frontman Handsome Dick Manitoba sued him for trademark infringement.
2. Snaith is scary smart: His father, mother, and sister all hold degrees in mathematics, and multi-instrumentalist Snaith graduated from London's Imperial College with a doctorate in algebraic number theory. He sees a shared abstractness between math and music: "It's all about playing around with ideas until you have a breakthrough," he explains.
3. The name Caibou emerged during an acid trip Snaith indulged in somewhere in the middle of the Canadian prairies. "It was just miles of nothing," Snaith recalls. "So we stopped the van, sat in a field and took some acid." During his adventure, a bear appeared to him and told him to change his name to Caribou.

Get It: Andorra came out this week on Merge Records, and the band will embark on a large-scale tour in the fall, which hits the U.S. in October and November.

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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