It's Saturday, and I was hoping not to have to work today, but the girlfriend was a bit greedy for some me time yesterday, and I was happy to oblige her. But here I am on a Saturday, enjoying the weather from out the window and watching ninja squirrels raid bird feeders.
So here goes though, time to start word dumping on whatever I happen to be listening to.
Incubus - If Not Know, When?
Not especially pleased to start the inaugural post with an album that I'm not especially pleased with, but hey.
Incubus to me is proof positive of how long a band can endure if they anchor themselves to a couple memories. How can I listen to this band without thinking of high school and my first visit to my future college, where the last thing I remember is talking about how important "The Warmth" was to my burgeoning music life before coming to face-first in a toilet a few hours later.
The band is bound to this moment in my life, and I've casually followed them since, never being particularly excited about them, but never particularly disliking them either.
If Not Now, When? seemed to be accompanied by very little fanfare. I was surprised to find out they had a new record coming out a few weeks ago, and even more surprised to find that I had only a fleeting interest in listening to it. It had been five years since their last release, and about seven since I cared.
Then Borders announced their liquidation, and I had two Borders gift cards from god knows when that I had to use, so I scooped this and Robot Chicken's third Star Wars DVD.
It's not the change to a more mellow, ethereal style that bothers me with this record, it's the sameness of it all. And the lyrics. Brandon Boyd has always struck me as a good guy, but he's a hit-and-miss lyricist at best, and this record forces extra attention to the vocals that I don't want to give.
What bothers me, perhaps, is the predictability of it all. I can almost picture the band getting back together after some time apart from each other, talking about the need to take their music in a different direction. Invariably, bands choose to go for a "mellower, more textured" approach, which, hey, really works well for a lot of bands.
Situations like this are precarious, and rife with potential for contradictions among us, the casual listeners. We don't like to feel betrayed by "our" bands, but we also don't want to see them treading water.
The only way I can reconcile this contradiction in myself is by acknowledging my desire to watch artists step confidently into new territory, but here it just feels like they're dipping their toes in the water to see if this is something they want to do. And just when they start getting a little bit more interesting with songs like "In the Company of Wolves" and "Switchblade," the album starts to wind down.
There are possibilities the band is missing here, and the album just feels kind of like one long, predictable song. It doesn't anger me as much as it lulls me. I don't want to see Incubus go back to what they were doing before, but I hope when they check in with us a few years from now, they'll have something more interesting to say.
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