It’s hard to imagine that The Caribbean aren’t composing my personal soundtrack when reading reflections upon their brand new and pre-orderable Discontinued Perfume.
“Discontinued Perfume is about the gray area — where we all live. . . Just breathe and try to relax: we’re all alone,” sings (frontman Michael) Kentoff. “Identity is intangible and uncontainable; you do your best to stake a claim, realizing that the power to be anything is largely out of your hands. The lesson of this album is that there is no lesson. The songs of Discontinued Perfume are snow globes — tiny dioramas to be shaken and shaken again…”
The hard questions and the vexing answers. The Caribbean are unafraid to go after them…lyrically or musically. And we’re delighted to have them here all week with us in advance of their brand new Hometapes release.
But to be fair, however deep and heavy all of this might sound, these guys are anything but dour. They’re funny, warm…and as their first Takeover post reveals, quite literate:
My Favorite Poem At This Moment
Matthew Byars | The Caribbean
Uncle Jim
by Peter Meinke
What the children remember about Uncle Jim
is that on the train to Reno to get divorced
so he could marry again
he met another woman and woke up in California.
It took him seven years to untangle that dream
but a man who could sing like Uncle Jim
was bound to get in scrapes now and then:
he expected it and we expected it.
Mother said, It’s because he was the middle child,
and Father said, Yeah, where there’s trouble
Jim’s in the middle.
When he lost his voice he lost all of it
to the surgeon’s knife and refused the voice box
they wanted to insert. In fact he refused
almost everything. Look, they said,
it’s up to you. How many years
do you want to live? and Uncle Jim
held up one finger.
The middle one.
The Caribbean | Mr. Let’s Find Out
