Like many Caribbean songs, “The Seventeenth Century" started with a melody floating around in the brain, waiting for a story. Around the same time, listening to a Judee Sill record, I heard the unmistakable connection between Bach, Judee Sill, Brian Wilson, Andy Partridge, and what The Caribbean is doing. And the continuum of melody, ideas, emotion, and art made sense to me.
It struck me that all of us, in one way or another, are participating in some time-honored tradition, trying, in some fashion, to move it forward - in so doing, tied, as if family, with everyone who came before. It filled me with a warm glow, although it could have been something I ate that day.
So, it was an essay or a pop song, the latter being much more fun, and like Suzanne Vega once said (I’m paraphrasing), once you finish writing it, you can play it!
I also had a couple of lines I really wanted to use. One, “I can’t protect you here / the worms are in control“ seemed like an interesting and unsettling introduction. It had no clear connection to the theme of the song but that’s never really stopped us before. We’ve played “The Seventeenth Century" live for a year or more and then deconstructed it and re-imagined it to some degree for the recording - and that’s what you have before you.
They’re taking Brill Building songs and writing them in invisible ink, turning jazz standards into Twilight Zone episodes, turning folk songs into clouds of fog.
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Chad Clark makes music in four dimensions. Please Advise offers a somewhat compact, yet still very outsized, version of his vision by virtue of its EP length. But walking around its dimensions, full of unknown colors and textures, I keep finding corners that lead to other rooms. Lars Gotrich
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Tattooed Love Boys gets all the attention on this record, but for me the real highlights are the two instrumental studies in the middle. Lydia & Crushow with its scratchy bass arpeggio intro and the soft acoustic gentleness of Not For Me, For Them. Beautiful stuff as always. Keep raising the bar y'all. endofanera