The Caribbean, Scott Solter Re-Populates the Caribbean

review by dave heaton

I was tempted to crack wise that this should have been titled Scott Solter De-Populates the Caribbean, as my first listen through I swore that in his remixing he had stripped all of the vocals clean away. Of course I just wasn’t listening closely enough. The vocals are sometimes there, but way in the background. Meanwhile background elements of each song have been pushed to the front and built upon.

Some of those background pieces will be familiar to fans of the Caribbean and their album Populations, five songs from which are remixed for this EP. But any sense of familiarity is joined by an exotic sense of the new. Take, for example, the little melody line from “That Anxious Age”, which is looped and sped in strange ways that also push the song closer to techno or something. These songs have an air of the original versions, but have been given a new face.

“Please Mister” becomes a meditation on space-noise. “Do You Believe in Dinosaurs?” finds its inner groove. “Color Television” is a spooky dub dance party, in a graveyard. These songs are almost unrecognizable in remixed form, but still carry the spirit of the Caribbean’s music. The way the Caribbean gets intoxicated by the mystery of sound is intact. And as Solter overhauls their music, he makes us go back and re-hear what was already there in the original versions. Where did these sounds come from? Not from nowhere, they were there…just hidden, or living different lives. Scott Solter Re-Populates The Caribbean may be surprising for fans of the band, but it also should be exciting for everyone.

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