REVIEWS

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XUBERX
Intelligent Demise

Radio.Active.Music

Posted: Friday, October 03, 2008
By: Trubie Turner

The first full-length album from Washington D.C./Baltimore area act XUBERX, Intelligent Demise is a deeply flawed album that relies far too heavily on formulaic composition and contrived emotion. One of the most obvious flaws of XUBERX is the misuse of the contrasting vocals styles of Zømßøy and Liebchen. Zømßøy's shouting vocal style can best be compared to Chris Randall's early work in Sister Machine Gun, prior to allowing his blues influence to show in his voice. However, where Zømßøy fails to compare to Randall is in his inability to show expression in his singing. Song after song Zømßøy's cadence and delivery is nearly identical and very quickly becomes tiresome despite its insincere intensity. Liebchen, on the other hand, largely employs an overdramatic operatic style that unfortunately mixes with the musical style of the album about as well as oil mixes with water. More often than not, Liebchen's vocals are so incredibly out of place that if the album were heard on the radio, the listener would likely think a different radio station was interfering with their signal. Liebchen obviously has vocal ability, but just does not fit with this band at all. Composition wise, XUBERX seems very much "paint by numbers" with a few moments of not being able to stay within the lines. When XUBERX's music isn't delivering the expected, it delivers the tacky, the cheesy, or the plain messy.

Despite all these complaints, XUBERX does manage a couple of tracks that qualify as at least decent. Even though it starts with a very cheesy distorted count off, "The World Ends Today" is one of the only cases on the album where Zømßøy's and Liebchen's vocals play off of each other nicely and mesh fairly well with the composition despite it being somewhat rudimentary. "Gone" provides probably the best musically structured song of the album; however, this is the track where Zømßøy's identical cadence and lack of expressive range starts to become painfully obvious. Though the rest of the album's tracks can range from dull to cookie cutter to annoying, a special wagging finger of shame needs to be pointed at the track "Lost Inside (Motoko's Mayhem Mix By 2501)." It is simply a textbook example of cheesy lyrics, how not to use vocal distortion, bad sampling, and incredibly clichéd and annoying composition.

Ironically, at the time of this review, XUBERX's MySpace boasts the tagline of "Destroying the world, two ears at a time." Judging from the contents of this album, they appear to be very much living up to that motto. Intelligent Demise is the sort of album that seems very average at first listen, but instead of growing on you, it festers on you until every flaw of the album is magnified a hundred fold and it becomes almost unlistenable. Taken outside of the context of the album, many of the tracks may be much more tolerable, but when repeatedly buffeted with such glaring flaws, they grate on nerves very rapidly and quickly become unforgivable.