Three Stars: The Caribbean
Welcome to the November edition of Three Stars. Tomorrow, we'll have an interview with DJ Will Eastman, on Thursday we'll take a look at the Routineers, and today we discuss The Caribbean and their recently released album, Plastic Explosives.
Plastic Explosives, The Caribbean
We want to get the details out of the way first. The Caribbean is a local band, composed of members of a handful of local acts past and present, including Townies, Smart Went Crazy, and The Foreign Press. Plastic Explosives is their third full-length, an 18 track mix of songs, distilled themes, and sound selections. You can buy it here. There, details covered, and we're free to write about this album properly.
Let us be clear about this: Plastic Explosives is one of the finest recent records we've found, from any act, local or otherwise.
It's an album that sneaks up on you. On listening, you find yourself looking for comparisons in other bands. There's the sonic playfulness and experimentation of a Neutral Milk Hotel or Wilco circa Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. There's the songwriting facility and harmonic dexterity of The Shins. There's a Beta Band like use of rhythm, and a post-rock way in which songs are deconstructed and reformed within tracks and on adjacent themes. But the comparisons aren't satisfactory. Somehow, the band has managed to craft a sound that's strikingly unique while still endearingly listenable.
The album has been described as minimalist, but that's a cleverly crafted illusion, and a tribute both to the production and the songwriting. There's a startling array of instrumentation on each track, but the songs never come across as busy. They invite you to pick apart the various contributions, the string tracks, the keyboards, the beatbox rhythms. They draw you deep into the construction of each song, so that when the parts rise and mix into smooth, grand chords, you're completely taken aback and left with nothing but an irresistable melody. The album is effortlessly daring; it's challenging and accessible all at once.
Lead vocalist Michael Kentoff's lyrics, breathily delivered, are compelling in their own way. He makes the familiar unfamiliar and romantic, making art of the commonplace, the business trip, the convention hall, our nondescript daily struggles. His vocal melodies display the same perfect quirkiness as the instrumentals, repeatedly finding surprising notes that somehow work, and the variations in his and the band's style and volume move seamlessly through the album, such that you're left at the end with the distinct sensation of having learned something about music, of having gained knowledge, but not in an antiseptic way.
Plastic Explosives is beautiful, plain and simple, and a treat to listen to passively. It keeps gently reminding you, though, just how subtly rich its songs are, how much it has to offer. It's a masterpiece, tucked away in and revealing the crowded streets and quiet record stores of the District.
Visit them at: http://www.thecaribbeanisaband.com
Hear them next: November 17, a Big Yawn event at DC9
Questions for Michael Kentoff, with contributions from the rest of The Caribbean:
First off, we have to ask about the website. It's a brilliant corporate send-up, complete with goofy office photos and business-speak. What are you guys saying with this presentation? It's funny, but is it also something deeper?
We’d be much happier if, instead of a band, people thought of us as an architectural firm that happened to write, record and perform pop music. But thanks for the word "brilliant" there; Matt no doubt appreciates it because he designed the site. And by “designed,” I mean stole the HTML code off of Microsoft’s website. That’s basically all he did – he morphed Microsoft’s site into ours. And I think he did it primarily because it made him laugh. A juicy cease-and-desist from Microsoft's lawyers would've been thoughtful of them, too. Then again, they'd have to know we exist first...
On the site, you describe the band's values, including helping the customer and constantly innovating. Are these guiding principles in your music, and if so, how do you feel you're pushing pop music forward?
Those are Microsoft’s guiding principles, but we’re happy to adopt them. I mean, we literally did steal their website; I wasn’t kidding. But we are very driven to innovate in a way, so the web site language turns out to be accidentally appropriate. I’m not sure we’re looking to innovate forward so much, though, as somewhere else. Just as long as we’re true to our own voice and we feel there’s a need for that voice, we’ll keep trying to run our shop. If we believe we're filling a gap in the marketplace of ideas, some of the downers of being in a band -- traveling when you’re not feeling very well, the strange smells, rejection, the same jokes repeated over and over and over and over, the deep-fried everything -- don't seem too severe. And the ultimate reward is making a connection, meaning something to someone.
The bands I cherished when I was getting into playing in a band – American Music Club, Husker Du, Miracle Legion – had the ideal set-up, in a way. They didn’t have super-large audiences and didn’t make any money, but the audiences they had were really dedicated and in love with them. There was a deep connection between artist and listener. American Music Club was at Iota last year – I think it was their “Hell Freezes Over” tour – and scattered in the crowd were all of these people I knew who formed their first bands in 1992, 1993 when AMC was putting out Everclear and Mercury and we were all very cognizant of how important AMC was to who we are. I remember talking to a number of people that night and we were all like, “Yeah, this band is like the primordial ooze” and wow what a great legacy to have! If you’ve done that, I’m sorry: no one can tell you you’ve wasted your life. I did have a chance to talk to Mark Eitzel after the show; I hope I told him all that stuff. I don’t remember; I was pretty starstruck.
We've described Michael's vocals to others as like Ben Gibbard, but with smarter lyrics. Who writes the lyrics, and what are the themes that tend to drive you creatively?
I do all of the lyrics, but I try to write them from some outside perspective so that everyone in the group has some kind of ownership. They’re rarely just about my life or my experiences -- mine alone aren't really all that interesting. Everyone in the band has lives outside of music and we know interesting people and have funny anecdotes from those lives. And we read The New Yorker and sometimes, even, books. The upside of not really fitting into a music scene is that music doesn’t necessarily become the primary vehicle for your experiences. We take our ideas from our jobs, our families, our favorite movies and buildings, grad school, food, news stories, a business trip to Kansas City – whatever. We don’t traffic in standard rock lyric fare because we don’t live anything like standard rock lives; we wake up way too early for that. Whether that makes our lyrics better or smarter than Ben Gibbard’s, yikes, who knows? I’d say we have a very different point-of-view from Ben Gibbard or really anyone else I can think of in indie-rock.
And, only because you mentioned Ben Gibbard, I do have to say that we’ve gotten a few Death Cab references and I just don’t hear it at all. Not even remotely. We got our first one a couple of years ago and I’d never heard them, so maybe I listened a little too closely when I finally got around to listening. You know like when someone tells you they know someone who looks just like you and then you see them and you’re horrified? I look like THAT?To me, Ben sounds a lot like Freedy Johnston, which is not a bad thing at all, but a different animal from me entirely. Maybe it’s because we both sound like guys you could beat up. In my case, that wouldn’t probably be much of a reach.
Along those lines, Plastic Explosives is constructed in an interesting way, complete with themes and shorter sound tracks between songs. Was there an overarching idea behind the album, and what can you tell us about the record's title?
The structure of the record is a creature of Matt’s thinking. Our friend Greg Jones helped sequence it because he’s got the Gift, but Matt thought of the tiny themes that dot the record here and there and tying it all together thematically. The title Plastic Explosives isn’t really connected to the big idea behind the record; we just had a song with that title and thought it made for a provocative album title.
The idea of the record’s structure was sort of metaphysical. The songs seemed to go together particularly well and, I guess, because we’re so thoroughly a song-based group, melody-based, Matt thought it would make sense for that to be the primary message of the record: that we’re melody freaks.
Almost like a theme or two that repeats in a musical, we would remind listeners or telegraph to listeners particularly key melodic hooks on the record. Like a subliminal plant – remember this melody; it might mean your life someday.
You've all been in music for a while now. What is different about The Caribbean compared to your other bands?
Matt, Tony and I came up in the DC experience of the 90s, but Don and Dave completely missed that. So we come at this group with very different experiences, different approaches to a bunch of different instruments and different psychological baggage – and Dave would probably go so far to say that he has no baggage, which might be true. But we all get along very well. We’re close friends; we do things together that have nothing to do with THE BAND. And yet there can also be an intensity of disagreement and friction that keeps things interesting. I mean, friction that would easily break up a group that didn’t actually like being together. I’ve not been in a band that’s tread that fine a line, but we’re pretty good at it – probably because we’re all grown-ups and we realize that no one means anything insulting or personal. Tony says that what he likes about the group so much is getting food at Pumpernickels Deli when we’re recording. It’s tough to argue with that; that might trump everything, actually.
In an interview on your website, you admit to some intimidation by the "cliquish DC 'scene,'" and its prominent labels (Dischord, Teen Beat, Simple Machines). Does the legacy of those labels still dominate the DC scene, or do you feel it has a different dynamic now compared to its past?
I don’t know. Dischord maintains a pretty powerful presence both locally and nationally. Teen Beat and Simple Machines maybe not so much. But it’s very different now than it was when Matt, Tony and I were first breaking in. I lived pretty close to Vinyl Ink in Silver Spring in the mid-90s. At that time, Vinyl Ink was practically the center of the My Bloody Valentine wannabee universe and I used to walk into the store and feel like a complete outcast even though I listened to most of the same bands. They even carried my band’s record in the store. I just couldn’t emulate the stick-figure mopey guy with the gas attendant shirt behind the counter; my face is too fat.
Now, I still have the chipmunk cheeks, but the dynamic in town is changing and it’s getting interesting. But is it a change of the scene’s dynamic or me letting my guard down? Probably, a little of both. Matt and I always said that we never felt allowed in to the party – even by people whom we liked and I think liked us. My reaction to that kind of rejection was to lock myself in a room and work through it, sort of “OK world: you won’t have me then I’ll make my own world!” It’s sort of a “my Mom says I’m cool” response, but that’s what it was like. The intimidation came as much from me as from anyone actually in the scene. And ultimately it helped me work, so I shouldn’t complain about it. Acceptance satisfies a hunger and it’s probably better creatively to be hungry.
Anyway: now I’m older and I’m taking my medicine regularly and I can see that people are people and all that shit. Now I look around and I see lots of interest in experimenting and in broadening the community to new ideas and new temperaments and I never saw that ten years ago. It was probably a combination of the scene being fairly closed back then as well as a heavy dose of defensiveness on my own part.
What are some positives about the DC music scene?
The people I know who are involved in music in DC are very smart, mature, purposeful, and interested in more than just music. It’s a diverse group of people with a sense of humor. I’m just discovering this. If you’d asked me five years ago, I might’ve said, “There are none.” Scenes are cliques and, by nature, exclusive. That’s always an artistic hazard, but I feel DC opening up a little.
What’s interesting is that the perception of DC probably hasn’t changed very much outside of DC. We were on the West Coast in July and people still asked us about Dischord and what Fugazi were up to, as if very little else in DC seemed to exist. I like a bunch of bands on Dischord and I like Fugazi, but DC music – even among Dischord folks as well as the guys in Fugazi – is much broader than that; I’ve come to realize I have a lot more in common with those guys than I would have ever imagined previously. We all told these people on the West Coast, “Hey, there’s all sorts of bizarre shit happening in DC – it’s pretty cool.” There’s a movement of overly analytical, over-educated oddballs doing all sorts of alchemical heresy, so, you know, stay tuned.
Negatives?
Dude, we’re all so beyond that. Actually for Tony, who lives in Florida, the DC scene at its worst has sort of crystallized. It’s all very fresh in his mind because, out of a sense of disappointment and disgust, he removed himself from the DC music scene even before he moved away, so it’s like perpetually 1998 or so and he remembers every shallow and abusive and negative thing he saw in great detail. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen anymore, but Tony, who was in a band that recorded for Dischord, witnessed a lot of what he thinks of as hypocrisy and what he would call “fascism.” He’s told me the story many times of going out to the old 9:30 Club in ’93 or ’94 with some friends who were apparently part of the scene and seeing some local band he’d never seen before. I don’t even know who the band was, but he LOVED the band – he was really moved – and he said so. All his friends sort of brushed him off and were way more focused on how the bass player was dressed – apparently he was wearing some questionable shoes – and Tony could, he says, instantly tell that this band was never going to be accepted locally because they didn’t wear the uniform; they didn’t have the password.
The problem with the DC scene is the problem with any scene, but it made us a little more disillusioned, maybe, because DC’s scene came out of punk rock, which was supposed to herald the destruction of hierarchy; you were accepted regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic background. If you have something to say, say it – it’s legit. Punk was a response to the shallowness of 1970s culture with an invocation to find common ground and eschew lots of surfacey, materialistic things for the sake of energyand soul. By the time I was coming up in DC as a guy in a rock group, the scene just seemed very closed and exclusive and probably a little fascistic, I guess. It was very easy to get yourself wished into the cornfield. I don’t think it’s still like that because I’ve met lots of really nice people who are really talented and we seem to enjoy each other’s company and haven’t really encountered the stuck-up attitude I used to perceive. Again, maybe the stuck-up attitudes weren’t there at all and I was just over-sensitive. Stranger things have happened.
Who are your favorite local acts?
Beauty Pill, Little Pink, and Pagoda are friends of mine, but, aside from that, I really think they’re onto some wonderful things. I want to play or help set up mics on their records because I believe in what they’re doing. They have soul. They also happen to be groups of funny, multi-dimensional people who have interesting stories to tell. They don’t want to just talk about the latest Pitchfork discovery all day. Also Don playing bass with Little Pink made him a better bass player in the Caribbean, so I’m grateful for that, too. And Chad Clark, who plays in Beauty Pill, has made enormous contributions to the last couple Caribbean records; he’s really responsible for the sonic image you hear. He’s also a darling. Who else? Our guitar player Dave’s other band, the Foreign Press, is still rather new but way too smart for their own good, which portends well. I really liked Dismemberment Plan and was not disappointed at all by Travis Morrison’s solo record. OK, there it is: I said it. I like Travistan. Travis and I also share a bit of a crush on Gilbert Arenas, so maybe I’m unduly influenced by that, but I thought Travistan, which got slagged off like Ishtar, was daring and unique and assbackwards in a useful, musical way. I think it’s a really good record. Oh, I also finally met Bob Mould, which was both mundane and scary. Would it be disingenuous to call him one of my favorite local acts?