For reasons that have since escaped me, I remember being briefly entertained by the Qemists' single "Stompbox" when it came out in 2007. It's probably because the time and place might have been just about right for a shamelessly boneheaded fusion of vaguely punkish metallic-type rock and something that you could probably call drum'n'bass without looking entirely misguided. I may have also been drunk, if that helps. In any case, it was a little get-stupid diversion that seemed fun enough to file away for future reference, to be occasionally exhumed by the odd off-road racing video game. If it's a little dumb, eh, what's the harm?
But oh man, Join the Q is so, so dumb. I don't mean dumb as snob shorthand for "catchy, simple, and arena-sized," which the Qemists are sort of shooting for and graze enough to draw blood. No, I mean the kind of dumb that results in a bunch of musicians striking on an idea with bright but limited shelf life, overextending that idea, and forgetting to practice a second one. The Qemists follow the hallowed decade-plus-long tradition of post-"Firestarter" bandwagoneers coming up with a lowest-common-denominator notion of, to use one of the 1990s' goofiest subgenre names, "rocktronica." In this case, it's a flailing, smothering mutation of jungle that doesn't trust the drums enough to haul all the momentum and feels obliged to drown it in layers of guitars and guitar-substitute distortion. And they only have one setting on their dial-- the one that makes the boorish, bellowing mook jungle of Pendulum sound as nuanced and reserved as Photek.
The Qemists are, at their roots, a rock band-- at least, that's how they started. And while they spent time moonlighting as drum'n'bass DJs after discovering the genre sometime in its waning post-Saturnz Return years, they seem to have missed something in translation: they heard 140 BPM but apparently focused more on the PM than the B. The great thing about classic jungle is that it took the dense elasticity of breaks like "Amen My Brother" and "Funky Drummer" and found countless ways to play around with their structures. The Qemists are more in love with the idea of the riff, so the rhythms on Join the Q have the blunt-force, blind-charging momentum of a drumbeat that's more interested in getting people to mosh instead of dance. And they're short on variety: "S.W.A.G." uses a near-identical drum pattern as "Stompbox". So does "Drop Audio"; so does "When Ur Lonely"; so does "On the Run"; so does "The Perfect High". There-- that's more than half the album. Take away the "tense moment" cue from a bad CGI-riddled action film that serves as the intro to "S.W.A.G." and an irritating 95-second beatbox routine ("Soundface", featuring someone named Beardyman), and that's just about two-thirds.
The fact that they switch things up a little for the other third would be a bit more encouraging if it wasn't so clear the Qemists are out of their comfort zone. They do manage to plow through a dippy mock-up of some of Nine Inch Nails' more recent stuff on the Mike Patton-featuring "Lost Weekend", at least for the minute and a half until they give up and go back to that one security blanket rhythm of theirs (so I guess we're up to 3/4 now). But what they put Wiley through on the cod-dancehall "Dem Na Like Me" is a damn shame-- he sounds awkward and stilted when he's not being drowned out, the exact opposite of his comfortably-flowing club-friendly advancement in "Wearing My Rolex". "Got One Life" is at least somewhat tolerable, thanks largely to a nice ragga-pop vocal from MC Navigator and a rhythm that doesn't come at you all full-throttle in your face Xtreem Cool Ranch Doritos and shit-- mostly because it sounds kind of like electro-house. (Funny that the one full-length track on Join the Q that isn't irredeemable resembles a less-adventurous version of a Justice outtake.) The rest is hyperactive brah-jungle that runs on Red Bull instead of Red Stripe, a headache conduit that sees rhythm as just a cheap, rudimentary delivery vector for joyless guitar bludgeonings. Familiar with "buttrock"? Here's butt'n'bass.
