Artist: Qube
Title: Incubate
Type: Album
Label: Electrum Production

Let me say first off, that Qube was a band I had no idea of, so I had no preconceptions as to their music. However, something about the CD that arrived had me wanting to listen, just based on the quality of the product. Unlike many white CDs with Sharpie smears on it or emails with download links, this review copy was a quality gatefold with some excellent artwork, namely a vulnerable looking planet Earth in a baby incubator. As a long time prog-rock fan, I couldn’t help but think of Yes’s classic ‘Fragile Earth’ as I looked at ‘Incubate’. The fact that only six tracks were listed for a full length album, running from six and a half to over eleven minutes each had me braced for a full on prog experience. This may sound shallow, devoting a whole paragraph to the look of the product, but in an ever tightening music market, where downloading and file sharing, legal or otherwise, is growing in dominance, first impressions can count a lot on making that sale on the shop floor, and the first impressions here were all good.

Onto the music, and does it match up to the quality of packaging it comes in? Damn right it does. Comparisons to Yes pretty much instantly disappeared on the first track, ‘Nothing’, having a far heavier presentation then the far east tinged whimsy of Jon Anderson and his cohorts. Instead, after the brief intro of the playing of children being faded into the ghostly voice of a phantom on ‘Nothing’, the music starts with a hypnotic blend of guitars, bass and drums, creating a deep and melancholy soundscape behind the vocals of Daniel Gielza. The most obvious comparison in terms of the band’s sound would be the likes of Tool, the repetition of musical themes adding to the mesmeric sound of ‘Qube’, punctuated by a note perfect, and context perfect, guitar solo. Far from being a one trick pony, ‘Qube’ show they are able to encompass even more extreme sounds; on ‘Obsession’ the vocals go from an almost eerily recreation of Lane Staley’s delivery, before almost hardcore scream over double kick bass drums and thrash tinged riffs. This soon develops into the bizarre funk and jazz influenced technicalities and time changes that tell of a wide grounding in musical styles, as well as a high level of skill in the instrumentalists.

The inclusion of the massive eleven minute plus numbers, particularly ‘Blame’, allows the instrumentalists of the band to wander far and wide in the prog landscape, the two guitarists trading riff after riff over the rhythm section’s complex beats long before the vocals join in and build up to the most angered shouts of the album. All this is finished off by an unlisted hidden seventh track, a foreshortened and single friendly reprisal of ‘Nothing’.

There is one hell of a lot to like and admire in ‘Incubate’, from the musical skills and excellent production, to the boldness of the band in putting out such complex and lengthy tracks. In all an excellent and complete presentation of progressive metal.

http://www.qube.com.pl
http://www.myspace.com/qubelu