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.