Review Summary: Back on the road of least resistance.
“It helps to know serenity from ennui,” sang Incubus’ Brandon Boyd on 2011’s
If Not Now, When. In retrospect, that may have been a memo that the Californian alt-rock outfit were meaning to send themselves - the quintet’s seventh studio effort was packed to the brim with inoffensive and often pristine songwriting, but there was not an iota of their usual menace to be found anywhere across the album’s fifty minute run-time. To many, it seemed like a once-tremendous band was finally losing its way. “
If Not Now, When was creatively very rewarding to do…but it really turned into, for lack of a better term, a collective dark night of the soul,” agreed Boyd in a recent interview with
Consequence of Sound. “It was a very dark, very arduous time for us as a band."
It’s of little surprise, then, that
Trust Fall (Side A), the first of two EPs that Incubus plans to release this year, sees the five-piece attempting to move as far away as possible from the elevator-music shenanigans that characterized
If Not Now, When. On top of that, the band also sought to gain additional creative momentum by concluding their twelve-year association with Epic and inking a new record deal with Island. “We shifted the collective tree of our creative family,” is how Boyd chooses to put it, and the results are there for all to see –
Trust Fall (Side A) may be only four tracks long, but it exhibits a level of diversity which suggests that Incubus have something to prove to themselves and their fans.
Such dogged desperation would certainly explain the presence of a song like “Make Out Party", at least. Here, Boyd sings lilting paeans to those of the female persuasion over a nasty, sludgy guitar riff that bands like Rising or Baroness would be proud of. The song is also home to this particular lyrical gem: “Let me introduce you to my slippery fingers, glistening and dangerous/Use them all in ways that would make you giggle at my funeral.” Charming. Elsewhere, “Dance Like You’re Dumb” could easily slip in between
S.C.I.E.N.C.E.’s “Magic Medicine” and “A Certain Shade of Green” and no one would notice. The sprawling “Trust Fall” in turn is a moody slice of alt-rock thoroughfare that seems a bit too stitched together for its own good, while lead single “Absolution Calling” is perhaps the only number that doesn’t feel like it has come totally out of left-field, with Einziger’s main guitar riff recalling the zeitgeist of (significantly superior) songs like “Anna Molly” and “Pistola”.
This certainly isn't the grand, sweeping comeback that Incubus might have so wanted it to be, but
Trust Fall (Side A) is a fairly respectable outing that should convince a few of the band’s doubters to give them another go while setting the stage nicely for
Trust Fall (Side B), which is expected to make an appearance this fall. Incubus are back – sort of.
