Friday, July 25, 2008

The Caribbean: Tour Dates/Remix EP/Daytrotter/New Website

Washington, DC's The Caribbean (Hometapes) is embarking on a flurry of tour dates over the next month, still in support of Populations (HT018), their most recent release. Scott Solter (Spoon, Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice) just completed a remix of five songs from said release -- tentatively titled Scott Solter RePopulates The Caribbean -- which will see release before the end of 2008. The band is also excited to be guests of Daytrotter on this current tour; those sessions will be made available in the next few months. Lastly, the band has just launched a new website to replace their infamous corporate send-up site that's been their home since the early 'oughts, although the old version is still available as a static, dust-collecting museum piece only.

Catch the Caribbean live:
Jul 28: Vaudeville Mews, Des Moines, IA
Jul 29: Big V's, St. Paul, MN
Jul 30: Daytrotter Session, Rock Island, IL
Jul 30: Empty Bottle, Chicago, IL (w/The Boy Bathing)
Jul 31: Mac's Bar, Lansing, MI
Aug 1: Bela Dubby, Cleveland, OH
Aug 2: Howler's Coyote Cafe, Pittsburgh, PA
Aug 3: The Manhattan Room, Philadelphia, PA
Aug 13: Glasslands, Brooklyn, NY

Populations, the critically-adored album from The Caribbean, was released in 2008 The super-literate bureaucrats from DC put together soft-spoken, artfully crafted, and slightly askew pop music that has tinges of jazz and experimental music laid over the band's typical wry musings about dinosaurs, German composers, and life.


Download: The Caribbean--"The Go From Tactical"

"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." -Pitchfork Media

"The band's third album Populations is their most delicate collection of expansive encyclopedia-pop, where fleshed-out scenes float through skeletal (but compositionally rich) bedroom transmissions. Or it can get especially subtle: referencing the end of the Go-Betweens via an Elliott Smith-redolent vocal line. That overall impulse toward hushed minutiae ends up sounding something like extinct D.C.-area crew Eggs hooking up with Franklin Bruno for a late-night whisper session." - Stereogum (from Quit Your Day Jobs)

"Over the years the Caribbean has been perfecting an unlikely style of pop music: melodic, yes, and in tune with the history of songcraft, but also filled with secrets. Its construction resembles minimalist architecture, with hidden depths. Their songs are a skeletal framework for a universe of questions." - Erasing Clouds

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