For sixteen bars I'm in a good mood. Here's a young man with a straightforward respect for guitar music and the basic ability to hang on to a riff.
After 43 minutes and 27 seconds of random fragments I'm a nervous wreck. The CAPILLARY ACTION concept is to gather "fragments" of guitar rehearsal pieces and mash them together in ways that achieve maximum listener disorientation and frustration. No songs. No tunes. Just dozens of bits that get trashed a tantalising few bars after it’s obvious they aren’t going anywhere. The technique is to follow each unpromising start with something stylistically disconnected but equally pointless. At intervals from 1 minute 46 to 8 minutes 09 a new track is declared open and things continue until the glorious silence that is the end.
Jonathan Pfeffer is the composer and principal instrumentalist on the CD. Some friends add piano drums and assorted electronics, but it doesn't help. The random piano jazz gives something else to listen to while trying not to think about everything else. But it does tinkle on the basic side. The percussion is occasionally busy, but tempos are not well controlled and things speed up and slow down quite alarmingly. Potentially fruitful electronic avenues are entered only to have the composer reverse rapidly away with Kelly's Heroes style speakers blazing dumb ROCK GUITAR solos at the startled residents. A lilting country intro with a walking bass does an ominous reprise and then … repeats. Twice. He refuses to write the bloody song that he knows we expect but gives us the benefit of half the tune picked out for one verse on a nice deep guitar. End. Some bossa nova Modern Jazz Quartet. Sort of.
There's a nice Eric Cartman comedy interlude called "Mid Coital Seizure", but it doesn't have a punch line and its ends up in Drabsville like everything else. There are other bits too. Always bits. Just like the bits that amateur bands tool around with when they should be rehearsing their set. "Jamming" they call it. "Messing about till someone has a good idea" as it’s more commonly known.
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Pfeffer isn’t a bad guitarist. He isn't especially gifted either, but he has practised those fingered jazz chords, that death metal distorto-shudder and those technical scales and he will regularly leave puny wimps like us for dead in the final head-to-head showdown to win back our fretted souls. Nevertheless, the main thing about guitarists that people want to hear is that they have something more or less coherent to communicate.
The defence would be that this reviewer simply DOESN’T GET IT. With respect, that's true in its own way and I defer to other reviewers who have found the album interesting. But crouched in my corner of the study, rocking gently back and forth, I notice the CDs I've been listening to with most pleasure during this atypical week of family Christmas. Through the mist I see they are WEIRD GUITAR albums. ZOOT HORN ROLLO. LIGHTNING BOLT. EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY. THAT FUCKING TANK. LIFT TO EXPERIENCE. AND NONE OF THEM KNEW THEY WERE ROBOTS. US MAPLE.
And that's what I thought I was being offered here. A great weird guitar album. The horrible irony is that if you set off to be weird, it looks like you run the risk of ending up being no more than a nuisance. So good luck with the East Coast tour Jonathan. And keep in touch. You’re going to be on a great album just when you least expect it.
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