Capillary Action - "So Embarrassing"

Capillary Action - Paperweights (Natural Selection 2008)

Capillary Action - So Embarrassing / Natural Selection

After posting a review on Capsule's Blue a few weeks back, I was contacted by Jonathan Pfeffer regarding the new Capillary Action album you see here. I was sure I had remembered the name, but So Embarrassing was not an album I had heard. "I thought our album would be right up your alley," he said. "We've been touring up a storm behind this record so any press we can garner would be greatly appreciated."

I'm suspicious of groups that ask for any press, but I was willing to give Capillary Action a try because I had remembered missing them when they played Columbia in January of 2006. A quick look around will also show you that Capillary Action has a lot of friends out on the road, and I was fans of a number of these bands. That reputation is at last starting to catch up with them in the press, and with good reason: So Embarrassing is a jarring listen, rarely letting you settle into any kind of comfortable mindframe. There is always something else happening.

"Gambit" sets the tone straight away, and though comparisons have been garnered to Kayo Dot, The Dirty Projectors, Battles, and Xiu Xiu (all of whom are on some level warranted), a Capillary Action listening experience is essentially listening to three groups rolled into one. The first is your Type A technically adept hardcore band. The furious bit that opens "Bloody Nose" is a good example of this, where double bass drumming and a heavy riff rock the middle and very end of the track. These kinds of moments are not quite as dominant on the record as you'd expect considering the whole reason this review exists is Capsule, but Pfeffer is smart enough not to overplay his hand. That metal growl doesn't really suit him anyway.

The second is an orchestra-backed bossa nova group. When I said that double bass drumming and heavy riffage rock the middle of "Bloody Nose," I didn't tell you how jazzy and calm the in-betweens were. The bossa nova really comes out on "Placebo or Panacea," which sounds as tropically relaxed as any song on the album. Horns and strings sound unhinged right at the start, but Pfeffer switches the sound just 22 seconds in and right away you're taken into a Rio nightclub from the 70s. The guitar noodling plays over boisterous brass toward the end, and it kind of sounds like The Mars Volta, but in a good way. Sergio Mendes this definitely ain't. "Badlands" is sort of like that too, very jazzy feeling with those poignant plucks lending sadness to an otherwise emotionally buoyant record.

"Paperweights" is the sound of that third group. That group is, er, Oceansize. Pfeffer's competent vocal abilities secretly hold this album together, but his croon is eerily comparable to the Mancunian band's frontman, Mike Vennart. Maybe it's that element Capillary Action has listed on the MySpace page as "melodramatic popular song," but thinking of some of Oceansize's more operatic moments comes immediately to mind on "The Chaperone." Weird connections aside, Pfeffer does for vocals what many of his friends can not: He tries to sing and succeeds.

So Embarrassing is more than just an Oceansized bossa nova-core record, though. I mean, read any review (positive or negative) and you'll see that everybody has a different angle, everybody hears something different, and it's likely you won't hear the same record the same way in subsequent listens. This is the Achilles Heel of the album, that you can never pin it down... But it's also Capillary Action's greatest asset: By deftly switching between recognizable sounds, the band forms its own. And by marking his own sonic territory, Pfeffer has won half the battle for the attention he deserves. Those 300 shows a year should take care of the other half.

Singleversity #65

Audiversity’s weekly column on music we stumble across during our sonic adventures. No random numbers, just straight audio goodness.

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We've heralded the brilliance of Over the Atlantic's "Fly to the States" (from their 2006 debut Junica) before, but recently I was cruising YouTube on a slow night and stumbled upon a mercifully full version of the way they played it live on their last U.S. tour. This is a very different approach from the recorded take: The bass sounds more New Order than hypnotically dubbed-out anchor. Given that Nik Brinkman and Bevan Smith are New Zealanders, it's also perhaps no surprise that the guitars are more jangly than they are awash in reverb and fuzz. I still like the recorded version best, but this is an enthusiastic live rendition worth checking out. Stay tuned to see what their next step is: Sophomore release Dimensions is out on Carpark sometime before the end of the year.

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So I interviewed Hans-Peter Lindstrøm (Yeah, that Lindstrøm) on the phone today. After spending around an hour just chatting about his new album Where You Go I Go Too, I feel like I know the guy well enough to at least say that his confidence in talking about his work isn't arrogance at all; it's like he knows how good he is and he just says it flat out. The sounds he makes come as second nature to him, and he is mercifully straightforward about not overthinking the actual music itself. When this thing drops, I expect it will be huge... So enjoy the simple delights of "Take Me to the Metro" (from 2006's Another Side of Lindstrøm) for a few more weeks before your life is changed forever. Hey, if he won't overthink the music, somebody else has to. That's what we're here for.

Singleversity #64

Audiversity’s weekly column on music we stumble across during our sonic adventures. No random numbers, just straight audio goodness.

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I haven't been doing much reading around the Internet lately, so I have no idea what the cool kids are listening to. I just know that Spaniard Ilya Santana has produced a hell of a space-disco slab on his EP Arcanus which came out in May on Ukrainian(?!) label Manuscript. Perhaps best known for a Human League remix of "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of" (from 1981's Dare!), Santana continues his ever-improving work in the Canary Islands. Maybe we'll see a full-length someday, but in the meantime, here is b-side "From Uranus to Mercurius."

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Space-disco tends to put you to sleep when it's not captivating you, so to balance this out, I'm still using old school emocore from the mid-90s to help me. Indian Summer is an excellent example of the genre. The Oakland-based band only existed for three years or so, and they made things especially difficult by not actually naming any of their songs. Tracking their stuff down was difficult for a long time because they stuck primarily to split 7s with contemporaries such as Current and Ordination of Aaron. Future Recordings made things easier by reissuing their two LPs and one of the highlights is "I Think Your Train is Leaving," which first appeared on a split with Embassy (Good luck finding anything else on them). The most well known addendum to this story: Marc Bianchi went on to front Her Space Holiday.

Singleversity #63

Audiversity’s weekly column on music we stumble across during our sonic adventures. No random numbers, just straight audio goodness.

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Japan's Nisennenmondai are fairly well known in the Japanese underground noise scene and have been jamming together since they first formed at a Tokyo university in 1999. The trio have a new album coming out later this month on Oslo's Smalltown Supersound, but Neji/Tori is really just two older EPs put together with new artwork by Smalltown roster member Kim Hiorthøy. Thankfully, there are a handful of videos on YouTube that showcase the group in a live setting. My personal favorite: "Ikkkyokume" is a seven-minute jam that actually appears on both EPs in slightly different variations. This video is a full-on version from 2004 that quite aptly demonstrates the capabilities of the three ladies behind that wall o' sound.

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One of the bands Nisennenmondai has opened for during one of their Japanese tours is Audiversity favorite Battles. Probably the most recognizable character from that band is big-haired journeyman Tyondai Braxton, who went from being a promising avant-garde solo artist to being a critical element in one of the most unique bands of the decade. Battles hadn't even formed when Braxton released his third solo record in 2002, History That Has No Effect. "Hold Onto Distance" is probably one of the least abstract songs on the record, but it's clear that the challenging creativity that makes Battles so vital now was already ingrained in Braxton at that point. The chipmunk vocal tricks, on the other hand, still appear to be a little further off...

2562 - "Aerial"

2562 - Morvern (Tectonic 2008)

2562 - Aerial / Tectonic

So, so many albums to hear this summer. They just keep coming, endlessly fascinating and frustrating and so many that are so long, so overly long, that it's tough to care about all but a select few. This is one of the latter. 2562, the Hague area code where the man behind it lives. At the moment, it is tough to argue the brilliance of Dave Huismans and his rogue record, a culmination of 12s tracked differently between CD and LP (You get two additional songs in "Walkover" and "Theorem" that do not appear on the CD, but you sacrifice "Channel Two," "Techno Dread," "Enforcers," and "Kameleon") that seem so out of step with the season that it could only be a dubstep record marketed exclusively for dubsteppers.

Too many things are wrong about this album for it to make the same impression on the masses that Burial did last year with Untrue. Even the lineage that led to Aerial seems wrong: Huismans has chosen Tectonic as his debut label, helmed by DJ Pinch of last year's last-second stunner Underwater Dancehall. For an insular scene that has largely kept its crop within South London, here are two guys operating beyond the geographical borders dubstep is so often unfairly planted with. Pinch is even further south and right off the River Severn to the west; Huismans is on the other side of the Channel in the Netherlands. But if there is much that this outsider reputation tells us about the anomaly that Aerial presents (and not just in the music, though we'll get to that in a second), there is also a lot that it isn't telling us, at least not directly: From the Internet's ability to decimate geographical exclusivity to the appeal it has across much of the Lowlands (There's a regular 24/7 dubstep stream from Belgium, for one example; plenty of others are out there to boot), Aerial is a milestone for a genre that seems to continue to evolve almost in spite of itself at times.

It's relatively easy to bang out a quick plate and be done with things, but making a dubstep full-length is tricky and 2562's first step was to keep it instrumental (removing the necessity for a second disc of instrumental's à la Pinch last year). The second major thing you'll notice in cuts like the thumping "Morvern" and the rubbery highlight "Techno Dread" is that Huismans was aiming for the scattershot minimal techno crowd. The feel that this is really just a Bpitch Control release at half-speed is evident, and if Ellen Allien were a dubstep producer, it's very likely she would be generating sounds not unlike those found on Aerial. It doesn't sound like this initially: "Moog Dub" brings an island breeze to the proceedings for a different approach to the sound. It's like you could almost, almost imagine this working at a party. It's also the most dub Huismans ever gets, at least until the digitally afflicted "Basin Dub" just past halfway. The heart of this record beats with the pulse of modern Berlin every bit as much as modern London.

When I first heard about this release a couple of months ago on Dubstepforum, the palpable sense of excitement was for a record that had taken the genre in a new direction and turned last year's cold synth stabs into warmer (if not friendlier) confines for a new year and a new crowd. Ironically, if this had come out last October, we might very well have been talking about 2562 as the record of the year. Closer to the truth is that, at this point, with so many tastemakers working on their tans and enjoying the density of the festival season rather than sitting behind a computer screen waiting for the Next Big Leak to satisfy their chilly isolation and exacerbate their loneliness, Aerial is doomed to the deadlands of underapprecation, destined to be unearthed either long after the excitement has died down or years from now when Huismans has retired from the game a defeated shell of a man who gave it his all and for one astounding record actually had it all right. That's extreme, and I hope it never comes to this... But I'm writing this review a month after the guy from Dusted, and I'm not seeing anyone else aside from Prefix care. It's all wrong. All of it, that is, but the music. In the end, this is what you cannot argue. Better that than some half-bit hack writing on his blog during listmaking season.

Singleversity #62

Audiversity’s weekly column on music we stumble across during our sonic adventures. No random numbers, just straight audio goodness.

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By crook or by diff, we never seem to talk about them here, but it's obvious that the spectre of The Nation of Ulysses looms large over this blog. The thought crossed my mind listening again to 13-Point Program to Destroy America, their 1991 debut, earlier this week. Thanks to a long history of punk-rock love for documenting its own respective "revolutionary" movement, videos on YouTube are thankfully plentiful for the 'Nation; it's tricky pulling out the best one, so I went with a few songs clipped from DC's Sacred Heart Church in what appears to be late 1991, right around the time that Washington's musical climate hit maximum Dischord thanks to a Mount Pleasant police shooting and George Bush Sr.'s gag order on federal funding for abortion clinic counseling. Further reading: Dance of Days by Marks Andersen and Jacobs, respectively. You'll see what I mean about that meticulous documentation bit.

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As far as summer jamz go, Watussi's "If All We Had Was Love" is right up there this year. I feel like I've been spinning this thing on repeat for ages now, and you probably already know and love it too, but it wasn't so long ago (maybe a month?) that the group was freshly revealed as an offshoot for Hercules and Love Affair's Eric and Morgan Wiley, with Stickydisc helming the release of the 12" (A-side "Purple Moon" is pretty killer too, though less overtly Herculean). Shaw nuff, here we are on STD003 with promises beyond mere Babytalk. Wonder how long it'll take the Australian-based Watussi to go all DFA'79 on them, then.