I have nothing to say about an album that says nothing. Except that it says it all about itself, and is very crafty about saying it well. The Caribbean has always made serious pop without a purpose, built of sequences of unmatched chords, cobbled from lyrical scraps that mean nothing in and of themselves, but when combined mean less. Doing this in a compelling way is no small accomplishment, and it comes off as thrillingly coercive: you're forced to occupy their barren pop architecture, unfinished, unfurnished and uninhabited. You don't understand it, but, though you might not admit it, you do hope it will understand you. Or at least not destroy you.
The songs are built with three tools: distance, omission, and interruption. Distance comes in when what you hear is very far from what any one person could have meant to put together. If you think of the original song as a canvas, there's been a fair amount of collaborative shredding, staining, stacking, and abrasion before this thing made it to the gallery wall. Omission comes in with the oblique lyrical style and near-incomplete textures. You feel like there's a real live pop song in there somewhere, but it seems that most of the essential moments have been recorded over with silence or incidental noise. There's obviously still a skeleton to hang a song on, but you start to wonder whether you're the one who was supposed to bring it.
Interruption refers to the host of accidental and ambient noises that flick your attention away from the action just as you're starting to follow along. Dishes clinking, microphone sputum, crackling static, antique telephones, or synth grains lure your ear away from the loping meat of the song just as it's sending out spores to slip under your skin. And they get there, without any hint of the irony that usually makes academic pop like this unpalatable. These songs are for real, but they're not about disappointment, or complacency, or shame, or attention, or glee. They're about themselves.
Without ironic distance, such oblique experiments can seem exhausting. But only on the giving end: it takes a humble and prolific writer, some cunning musicians, a very patient engineer, and an overarching commitment to self-censorship to pull an album like this off. On the receiving end, however, the pop wreckages of "History's First Know-It-All" are quite easy to enter. Most are loaded with all-purpose catharsis, ready to be nodded to on the way to a blind date, or just as things are getting serious, or a few weeks after the break-up. They're taut with a kind of pointless frankness, but the point is just to be taut. And they are.
