Q And Not U

(Dischord Records)

It’s not entirely clear to me whether the best way to describe Q and Not U’s latest is as “post-punk that lacks conviction” or “dance-punk that fails to make you want to dance.” All academic labeling aside, however—the quartet-now-trio (their bassist left after the first album) hailing from DC and on Dischord Records falls short in its third attempt at a “new sound” in as many albums. After their first album, No Kill No Beep Beep, which showed some positive post-hardcore influences, their second album (sans bassist), Different Damage, softened up a bit on some tracks (“Soft Pyramids”), but elsewhere managed to get a bit more dance-y ( “Black Plastic Bag”). Power, unfortunately, lacks any of the redeeming qualities of their first two attempts. After an opening track (“Wonderful People”) that sounds as if they can’t decide whether the sound they want to go for is more of an imitation of the Moving Units, the Faint or Michael Jackson, the album keeps sliding downhill.

While some bands excel at pulling off a sound that is consistently bad, this album manages to be bad in an impressively divisive array of different vibes and song structures—though the falsetto vocals serves as the bedrock of vapidity that they continue to fall back on throughout the songs. While “7 Daughters” starts out with potentially awesome-sounding Nintendo tracking, the boring song structures and hipster vocals fail to move anywhere. The song “X-Polynation” shows the potential to be a people-mover with its initial driving beat and idiosyncratically spastic flute, but crashes down as the band takes a trip to New York with their generic imitation-Rapture-or-other-New-York-Hipster-Band vocals; the mediocre rock tune, “Collect the Diamonds” is annoying way past the initial irritating line in which a DC band sings about people “standing in a queue.”

One of the more interesting highlights of the album is the quietly interesting electronic sounds in the background of “Beautiful Beats,” which serve however only to frustrate, because it is a testament to the fact that the band is capable of making interesting music, if only they could get past their overactive sense of hipness and sadly atrophied conception of genuine innovation and feeling. At the risk of telling you what you’ve probably already heard, listen to their first album, where they actually manage to rock a bit—or if you must, listen to their second album, where they generally pull off the dance-punk vibe much better. The long term solution, though, is to avoid the band altogether and throw on some Black Eyes instead.

—Jim Fingal