It's not terribly often that a band's website is good enough to make me want to recommend it along with their music, but The Caribbean's remarkably professional online domain is such a resoundingly brilliant sendup of a bland, mission statement-touting corporate website (replete with two generic employees mugging in the header and loads of meaningless business nothingspeak) that I initially thought I had the wrong URL. Given that I spend all week breathing a Fortune 500 company's recirculated air and cynically deconstructing the grammar and vocabulary of memos explaining to me why giving me less money is good for the company, I found this all quite hilarious. This kind of satire only works if you do it to the hilt, honing the vocabulary and patterning the entire site after the same concept, and to their credit, The Caribbean haven't missed a single detail.
And fortunately, The Caribbean are just as detail-oriented in their music. They've even brought some of their website into their packaging for this, their second EP, styling the recording credits after a W2 form. The sense of space between the airtight drums and the colder, more open sound of the remaining instruments is immense, and it frames their occasionally obtuse lyrics in a weird, urban texture that nicely echoes the slideshow of outdoor urban photographs by cover artist Sara Padgett included on the disc. Of course, you could always argue that couplets like, "The only way the teletype gets out is by the bounty of my merciful soul/ I'm the one who has the code," make a lot more sense than the average corporate memo.
Actually, Michael Kentoff's lyrics have grown significantly more focused since his stint in the mid-90s with D.C.'s Townies, and he delivers a couple of great narratives on William of Orange, the best being "The Druggist's", a tale of summer job ennui. Kentoff's Gibbardish tenor is doubled by a piano as he lays out a scenario in which he obtains his driver's license, and a job to go with it. The way he describes a 16-year-old's real (if petty) concerns is fantastically inventive, despite its very simplicity: "Delivering prescriptions posed a special problem with the manual transmission/ The druggist's car, a Rabbit, smelled like oil and coffee/ Had no radio or tape deck/ Begged my mom to let me drive our Chevy wagon."
The opening title track sets the mood nicely with Tony Dennison, late of Smart Went Crazy, laying down a busy yet relaxed drum part which the band coats in carefully placed electronic textures and rich, room-temperature acoustic guitars. Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service are apt comparison points, especially now that Kentoff has developed his knack for evocative imagery and inexact rhyme. The Caribbean do much to move themselves to the forefront of pop fit for late-night headphone sessions in wood-paneled dens on William of Orange, and if they can stretch this consistency over their next album, we have much to look forward to.
