Even when you've already written about them a few times, it's still tough to figure out a clear way to explain a band like the Caribbean. They're so close to being a straightforward indie rock band that it's temping to place them as some sort of prog-pop spin on early Death Cab. But they're not a straightforward indie rock band. They're half that and half something odder. It's not just the cues they take from electronic and ambient music; they have a strange way of constructing songs, from the lyrics on down. Verses have no rhyme scheme, chord progressions seem drawn from a hat. It's as though the band had all the pieces for comfortable indie pop in its possession but no interest in putting them into a standard order.
This is of course what makes them interesting. They are bound to confound your expectations several times on any given album, and if you're into that, they're good enough at putting these weird songs together that they can pull you in with surprising ease. Discontinued Perfume is the band's fifth album, and on this record they've struck a nice balance between building moody, memorable songs and keeping listeners off balance. Acoustic guitar plays an important role on the album as a center for most of the songs, but it's often set against pounding drums or noticeably synthetic keyboard sounds. Michael Kentoff's gentle, high tenor, wrapped in a blanket of reverb throughout the album, acts as a sort of thread tying those disparate sounds together, while the electric guitars take on a variety of destabilizing roles, intoning with ragged melody lines, atmospheric accents, and even a couple of outbursts of back-masked squirming on "The Clock Tower".
That song is one of the album's highlights, making good use of a simple piano part to keep the song's momentum building. The back-masking is a nice lead-in to the dream-like ambiance of the next song, "Collapsitarians"-- the band clearly put some thought into the sequencing of the album. The title track generates a dreamy, psychedelic atmosphere, mixing the acoustic instruments on top of the electric ones and bringing in a strangely funky rhythm guitar part. The hint of funk sits in uneasy harmony with lines about people being wheeled away by paramedics. The album's best song is "Artists in Exile". It opens with an ambient recording of a crowded place (an airport?) but progresses into some uncharacteristically tight verses, which are contrasted against what amounts to an instrumental chorus.
By the time the song shows up in the tracklist, you've been set up by the band not to expect such open concessions to pop craft, so the unusual arrival of a strong instrumental hook hits doubly hard. This is one of the reasons it's important to approach Discontinued Perfume as a full album, intentionally put together in a certain order. The Caribbean have never been what you'd call a singles act anyway, but here you need to take in the whole picture the band is painting.
