The Caribbean

D.C. hardcore left strange and unpredictable ripples spreading across the musical landscape. We're still finding its unexpected third- and fourth-generation offspring today, decades after the city's teens went mad with social angst. That same aversion to conformity, that same world-weariness when it comes to politics, is alive and well in The Caribbean. Only it's all grown up now.

The members of this band have been active in the D.C. scene for 20 years and, as songwriter Michael Kentoff told his label, this long immersion has led to a "not fit-in personality." Everyone else goes loud, so The Caribbean goes quiet. The result, from that same interview, is somewhere between gentle acoustic pop rock and "elaborately arranged outsider art." Think a very, very humble Fugazi.

Discontinued Perfume, this year's offering, sees The Caribbean patiently telling intimate stories in songs like "Municipal Stadium" and "Mr. Let's Find Out." And as relaxing as this music would be in a lesser band's hands, there's always something disconcerting or pulse-quickening in these songs. "The houses are real and the garden looks real/ and everything looks nice enough to steal," Kentoff sings as a flute melody wanders gently. "Artists in exile on your street/ you're living all right/ all right." Something, somewhere, is very wrong.

The Caribbean's songs are devastatingly understated anthems of individuality, with an obvious ancestor in The The's Dusk. Kentoff treats his beloved Washington, D.C., as microcosmic for modern culture, with concise, poetic results. Delicate guitar work, often fingerpicked on nylon strings, joins with gentle drumwork to form a tapestry that is at the same time bleak and calming. The music is urban and intense: a long postmodern sigh, somewhere between stoic and sensitive and delivered just right. —Corbie Hill