Caribou

For a guy with a PhD in Math, Dan Snaith sure knows how to find the human warmth inside a machine. Over the course of four albums — his latest, Andorra, was released last August — Snaith (AKA Caribou, formerly known as Manitoba) has coaxed some elegant and ethereal dreampop out of an amalgam of computers and live instrumentation. Without disparaging the creativity and talent that goes into those records, though, it must be noted that there's an entirely different standard to meet when presenting music like that live. As fans of electronic music are more than aware, a "concert" that features a dude, a stool, a table, and a laptop is usually neither visually intoxicating nor musically invigorating. Unless it's Otto Von Schirach. Caribou is certainly no Otto Von Schirach, but that PhD-sized brain of Snaith's led him to the obvious conclusion that the expansive tones of his music might be better served up in a live environment by actual musicians. To that end, a Caribou concert is exactly that, a concert, no snark-quotes necessary. Though he brings along the necessary human accompaniment to deliver his swooning tunes out of the bedroom and onto the stage, Snaith nonetheless bounds around from drums to guitars to keyboards to samplers, making for a live show that gets to the lively core of his otherworldly music.