Capillary Action's debut album, Fragments, was an instrumental guitar showcase brimming with virtuosity and violent rhythmic shifts. I think I could be forgiven for expecting more of the same from So Embarrassing, but holy confounded expectations, is this ever a different album from its predecessor. Are there still wicked rhythmic turns, hints of jazz, and mind-bending guitar runs? Sure, but this time they're all subordinated to songs-- the first thing you hear on this album is guitarist Jonathan Pfeffer's voice, singing over a breakneck but fairly straightforward rock beat.
Pfeffer is now clearly playing with the tension between straight-ahead indie rock and spastic, mathy composition. Opener "Gambit" has those basic verses, but breaks them up with ragged odd-metered riffs, alternating in a way that makes each new 4/4 verse sound even more propulsive. A similar approach guides the album's best song, "Elevator Fuck". The band uses a string synth and what I think is a real trombone to inject sweetly melodic but rhythmically strange phrases between verse lines that seem as though they should disrupt the flow of the song but don't.
Whereas the band's first album reserved the middle for its most introspective moments, this one gives us the aggressive experiment "Badlands", which features the sounds of Pfeffer's breathing cut up and made into a brutal rhythm. It's one of several tracks to use extreme dynamic range to great effect. "Pocket Protection Is Essential", for instance, sets quietly melodic sections against the heaviest, loudest bits on the album-- it's genuinely startling the first time the shouted vocals and pounding drums crash in, and not much less startling each time after that. Closer "Self-Released" uses all these techniques to create a collage of a song that has the pacing of a brawl, with quiet moments to catch your breath followed by furious passages of pounding rhythm and dissonant swells.
The album as a whole extends the collage feel, with each track flowing easily into the next to make a kind of suite. The songs aren't inseparable from each other, though; quite a few of them work well on their own, and this owes much to the band's overall stylistic re-orientation. Pfeffer's even, baritone vocals add a strong melodic center for the listener and put the instrumental freakouts in context. So Embarrassing is a bold change in direction for Capillary Action, but one that pays off as well as one could hope. From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11266-so-embarrassing/
