I often ponder- because that’s the kind of guy I am, with not much else to do – about the fine line between imitation and influence. Hey, these are life or death decisions when it comes to judging the merit of an album. It could be the difference between a great record and a mere photocopy of one.
It’s this land, shrouded in a hazy shade of grey, where So Embarrassing needs to be judged. See the thing is, you can’ fault what each member is playing. The ensemble of musicians that make up Capillary Action are all exceptional (save the vocals of ringleader Jonathan Pfeffer, but more on that later). But I’ll be damned if they haven’ heard Mr. Bungle before.
This is my beef with Capillary Action. Ostensibly, So Embarrassing is a good – not great – album. But it’s essentially the record that Mike Patton or Trey Spruance never made. It’s 31 minutes of schizophrenic genre-hopping, an avant-garde patchwork of metal, jazz, Latin, 20th century classical music and whatever flight of fancy Pfeffer may have had while he was writing the songs.
Pfeffer’ assembled an eleven-piece band to flesh out his musical ideas, which includes string and horn sections and a classical percussionist, alongside long-time collaborators Spencer Russell (bass), Richardo Lagomasino (drums) and Kevin McHugh (keyboard). There is a surgical precision to the instrumentation on the album. “Pocket Protection’ hops and skips between gut-wrenching death metal and cocktail-drowning lounge music while “Sexy Koala’ is a flurry of drum fills and guitar solos. Pfeffer dribbles his vocals in varying degrees of pitch, but they’re secondary to the musical chaos raging around him.
Yet it’s all been done before. If you’ve heard anything by Mr Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3 or Dillinger Escape Plan circa Irony is a Dead Scene, you’ve heard all of Pfeffer’ ideas. So Embarrassing is a largely self-indulgent piece of work by the frontman, who clearly wants to make the most erratic album he can. He’ also the illustrator of the album’ rather crude and amateur artwork.
Perhaps he should learn from a song like “Paperweights’, which is a disarmingly beautiful Latin-flavoured number anchored by Spanish guitar, castanets and understated legato strings. This is a great example of incorporating influences. The rest of the album, sadly, is just plagiarising them.
Dom Alessio
