Slappy Scrutinizes… Q*bert’s Conundrum – S/T

Band: Q*bert’s Conundrum
Album: S/T
Personnel:
Zane Flanagan – lead vocals, zither
Nico Flanagan – keyboards, analog synthesizers, melodica, vocals
Burgess Walter- guitars, glockenspiel, vocals
Clyde Duval – bass, vocals
Keather Lucinda – trumpet, trombone, soprano sax, vocals
Dee Dee Severins – Theremin, bagpipes, vocals
Darryl Yarborough – drums and percussion (except tambourine), programming, vocals
Doug Feirstein – tambourine, vocals
Label: Vainglorious Records
Release Date: 17-Feb-2015
Slappy’s Scrutiny:

The new self-titled album by Q*bert’s Conundrum is quite a departure from the experimental indie octet’s previous offerings, most notably because it is the first to tackle the subject of the band’s namesake, and because it is a concept album chronicling a real-time journey through the first 17 boards of the iconic 1980s isometric platformer. Q*bert’s Conundrum was, depending on the account you believe, either created over a weekend in Burgess Walter’s garage or has been obsessed over, rewritten, and re-engineered for more than half a decade. The latter could be a cause for skepticism considering past statements made by band members. It must be mentioned, as it often is in music publications, that Zane Flanagan—the de facto face of QC—has articulated an open disdain for formal music education.

To think that you—to think that anyone can actually study music is, like, an affront to everything I believe music should be. It creates this, like, construct that forces the artist to stay within the lines and make these cookie-cutter compositions to appease the, the frothing consumers of mass-produced, played-out bullshit. It’s not about the song; it’s about how the sound, how the frequencies rattle around in your head and make you feel. Love, hate, sorrow, joy… they’re all just vibrations, and they’re all under constant bombardment and manipulation by everyone around us. We just want to make sounds that negate the negativity, that extend a giant middle finger to Corporate America and envelop our fans in the purest form of positive expression.
     —Zane Flanagan

The album’s contents may belie Zane’s grudge against musical know-how, but he has upheld his stance against showmanship and traditional guitar solos, what he and others have called “wanking”. The collection of songs are, for all intents and purposes, through-composed in the sense that there are no repeated lyrics or song structures, but Q*bert’s Conundrum is not without its recurring themes and deft allusions. It is an extensive odyssey rife with parables. Some high points follow.

The opener, “We Are the Twenty-Eight”, is no slow-burner. It ignites with a quick glockenspiel flurry and launches directly into the wall-of-sound style that QC is known for, replete with a chorus destined for an emotive movie trailer. Cymbal swells accent a wordless vocal melody that is said to mimic the seemingly random phonemes of Q*bert’s native language. Each of the eight members provide multiple vocal tracks to form a massive choir that builds to an uplifting frenzy as Q*bert (and the listener, by extension) completes Level 1, Round 1.

“Ugg and Wrongway (Workers Unite)”, is a showcase for Zane’s range as he effectively voices the two characters and interjects Q*bert-like utterances to form a three-way lyrical conversation. The instrumentation is very stripped-down and raw, with Duval and Yarborough’s rhythm section providing the propulsion for Burgess Walter’s clean and catchy riffs. The song is simultaneously about the combative endeavors within the Q*bert universe and the plight of working-class America pumping its hard-earned quarters into a glowing machine for one more turn at detached escape on a Friday night.

“Are You There, Slick? It’s Sam” is an instrumental featuring a contrapuntal entwining of Severins’ Theremin and Lucinda’s soprano saxophone, with a bagpipes pedal point churning softly underneath. Programmed breakbeat drum loops make the song coalesce into a unified pronouncement on equality. The song is said to represent the furtive off-screen dalliance of the two titular bad guys, something zealously ridiculed and discriminated against when Jeff Lee sketched his original ideas for the characters.

The 17-minute romp, “@!#?@!”, contains a drum feature bookended by sonically abrasive but overwhelmingly impassioned passages. The tune, which the band refers to by its purportedly correct pronunciation, begins with the brothers Flanagan: a sonata on Nico’s prepared piano over which Zane narrates the labyrinthine route Q*bert travels on his quest to alter the color of his 8-bit world. The rest of the group gradually enter the mix, building to an unforgettable spotlight on Yarborough. To the casual listener, it may sound like Yarborough is skittering over barlines and skillfully creating polyrhythmic tension over the vamp supplied by his bandmates. In actuality, the production notes reveal that he set his kit at the top of a secluded hillside in Brooklyn, hurled the instruments down, digitally processed and quantized the resultant cacophony, made an analog recording to tape through a megaphone in front of a tube amp, then finally fed the amalgam back into the DAW. It is impossible to hear this marvel the same way after knowing the unbridled artistry that went into it. The work closes with the reentry of the full band. The volume of Nico’s dissonant synths crescendos while Zane reacts with inverse proportionality. His dulcet, whispered singing quavers like the springing body of Coily as he delivers symbolic lyrics relating the changing of board colors to human-influenced climate change.

“Single-minded Obsession with the Monochromatic” finds Zane at his most brooding. Imagine the melancholy baritone of Nick Cave punctuated by percussive vocalizations in the tenor of Thom Yorke, accompanied only by the arrhythmic clatter of Doug Feirstein’s broken tambourine. (Via the liner notes: “The clanking tin can of a homeless man outside the arcade.”) Clyde Duval lays down a driving but simplistic bass line and belts out heartrending, haunting backup vocals redolent of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The younger Flanagan then overlays a repeating melodic pattern on the zither while issuing a thinly veiled but wickedly clever, devastating critique on factory farming. Keather Lucinda’s horn stabs can’t help but bring to mind the factory end-of-shift horn signaling the workers’ release, their escape to the arcade, and Q*bert’s success in making one last color-coordinated world before the lights go out for the night. It is not until these fading moments of the album that the narrative’s twist comes into full focus: That Q*bert’s quest is folly; that his determination in abolishing all the supposedly mismatched colors made him a chip on the motherboard of the very machine he thought he was rebelling against. Burgess Walter’s final strums are the mournful counterpart of Q*bert looking out from his 2D landscape at the hand on the solitary joystick beyond the screen controlling him from a three-dimensional universe that is virtually as simulated as his.

As a band, Q*bert’s Conundrum has never been destined for everyone’s stereo, and with this, their finest album to date, they are in no danger of changing that. Few artists can simultaneously evoke such deeply emotional sentiments and get your feet tapping. Few can speak intelligently about the band’s deeper cuts, but fewer still can say that they haven’t heard a QC song in a Duplass Brothers movie. The band is as cryptic and complex as any of us flawed individuals, so it is unclear whether or not they revel in this fact or despise it.

As an album, Q*bert’s Conundrum is, by design, about a frivolous adventure and about the only adventure. It is about a funny-looking little orange guy conforming to Western ideals, and it is about humankind as a civilization and a species. Who were we to have given birth to Q*bert? Who would we be if we had not? Who will we be if we forget him and his struggles?

The album is currently in a limited, vinyl-only release until QC hits the road in support this spring.