Washington D.C.'s the Caribbean make music that just shouldn't work, and yet it has for some time now. Michael Kentoff's lyrics are written as though he never thought of putting them in a song. There's little rhyming, little conventional pop organization, just thoughts in complete sentences, laid out in winding phrases over complex, ever-shifting arrangements. And yet he pulls it off, somehow. Granted, it doesn't come together as well across the whole of their fourth album as it has in the past, but it's still an interesting and unique world they inhabit.
As the band sets out a strange bed of eclectic instrumentation and unusual chord progressions, Kentoff maps a world caught between childhood imagination and adult drudgery, where you can be a secret agent one minute and stuck in a dead-end job the next. His breathy vocals-- sort of like a cross between Ira Kaplan and Ben Gibbard-- improbably thread his words through soundscapes or marry them to unexpectedly sharp beats. The whole quintet switches off instruments throughout the album, though Tony Dennison does most of the drumming.
The best songs are oddly transcendent. Lead single "Go From Tactical" is one of these, being a great example of how Kentoff takes these non-rhyming phrases and uses melodic phrasing to give them a sense of poetic resolution. It even has a chorus, made catchier by the inclusion of a female backing vocal. The passage that follows it features a weird modulation and a few fragmented phrases from guitars and keyboards that somehow coalesce into a compelling melody. "Color Television" is just as good, built from a series of elliptical images and acoustic guitar parts that are gradually subsumed by keyboards.
On the other end of things, there are a few songs that are simply awkward, even if they still include some interesting moments. "Do You Believe in Dinosaurs?" frames an uncomfortable childhood moment (a boy is asked by his Jehovah's Witness friend whether he believes in dinosaurs and doesn't want to offend the asker by saying yes) with solid guitar and great-sounding drums. But the vocal melody just wanders around, hitting an especially sour point where the word "god" is drawn out into a melismatic phrase that simply doesn't fit the music.
"Bees, Their Vision and Language" is similarly stilted in spite of a fairly conventional arrangement (for the Caribbean, that is). A few moments that initially sound forced get easier to understand with multiple listens-- as generally accessible as it is, the album is complex and unfamiliar enough that it takes some time to immerse yourself in. This band's music is something like a puzzle, which is most rewarding when fully assembled. When one piece doesn't fit perfectly, it can throw the whole thing off. Though Populations has a few more ill-fitting pieces than past efforts, it's still an intriguing record from a very unique band.
