Sounds From The Junkshop #115 - Incubus

 

"The world's a rollercoaster, and I am not strapped in..." - Incubus - Wish You Were Here

Sometimes, Sounds From The Junkshop throws up some surprises when you're writing these columns up. Incubus were one of those bands who I was convinced had sunk beneath the waves many years ago once the nu-metal wave they surfed in on petered out - their last hit over here in the UK was in 2005, around the same sort of time I stopped reading Kerrang and started moving across to looking for fanzines that more reflected the way my music taste was going. So imagine my surprise when doing my research here to find out that the band are still big business in their native USA with their last few albums all hitting the Top 5 over there even though they've been making a very meagre splash on this side of the Atlantic in those intervening years. Strange business this looking back at your twenties sometimes. Anyway, let's investigate a bit further, shall we?

Incubus were one of those bands who were great for one album and then never really capitalised on its promise - a familiar story to those of you who read this column regularly. It was their second Top 40 hit, Wish You Were Here that brought them to my attention and I picked up the attendant album Morning View soon afterwards when it came out. Listening back to it now, it's actually not held up too badly. Although Incubus probably did owe a little bit in their sound to the prevailing nu-metal winds of the time (mainly the whole Limp Bizkit style DJ scratching overlaying some of the tracks), they were really a world away from that crowd especially their lyrics which, admittedly, these days come across as a bit over-pretentiously hippy-dippy in places but back then it was just refreshing to hear a band who weren't just resorting to heavy metal Backstreet Boys style numbskullisms. I still remember me and the other guy I used to do a radio show on KUBE way back in the day used to have a running joke if we ended up playing some terrible nu-metal or fratpunk single where we'd follow up the band and song name with the words "...no doubt soon to be appearing on the new comedy film Dude, I Just Barfed Up Yo' Ass! starring Sean William Scott..." With Incubus though, Morning View was a refreshingly varied album by the standards of the time from the comedown paranoia of 11am to the more aggressive riffola of Have You Ever? I liked them despite my better instincts really.

I went to see Incubus a couple of times back then and one thing that was always a bit refreshing was that their audience was a lot more evenly split between guys and girls than most of their contemporaries. I suppose it didn't hurt them having a muscular longhaired frontman in Brandon Boyd who wasn't averse to taking his shirt off onstage but a lot of their music was a lot more melodic and less wantonly grossout and really, it's probably good that we had bands like them - without them, the whole early noughties metal scene would have been an even worse testosterone-drenched sausagefest than it already was. At least at an Incubus gig you could kind of rest easy knowing you weren't likely to get punched in the mouth by some baseball cap wearing tosspot who'd drunk more than the three pints he could handle and was looking for a fight unlike yer Blink 182's and Korn's. It served them well enough that they chalked up four Top 40 hits over here with the vaguely Spacehog-esque Are You In? following Wish You Were Here into the chart.

One thing that definitely does strike me listening back to Incubus now though is that if anything they sound like the sort of band who should've been huge about ten years before they were as there's a very latter day grunge feel to their songs. Pearl Jam's Ten album especially seems to hang over them - Circles IS basically Evenflow and even their best song Wish You Were Here has a definite hint of Alive about it. You can also hear hints of the Smashing Pumpkins (Mexico definitely owes a tip of the hat to Corgan and co's Disarm) and Nevermind era Nirvana (Agoraphobia has a very similar feel to Lithium).

I suppose this should have put me off them a bit but you need to remember that this is my 24-25 year old self we're talking about here rather than the current fortysomething vintage. Back then, I didn't know that Pearl Jam had actually once been the far superior Mother Love Bone and thought Ten was probably their best album (to be fair, it still is the best thing they put out under that name). And to be honest, it was just good to find a nu-metal band who didn't want to make me tear my own ears off just to stop myself from hearing them (see also Grand Theft Audio and One Minute Silence).

No, where it DID kind of go wrong for Incubus was on the follow-up, A Crow Left Of The Murder. Although it gave them another Top 30 hit in Megalomaniac and went Top 10 over here (their only album to do so), listening to this one it hasn't held up nearly as well as Morning View has unfortunately. I seem to remember when I bought it in 2004, I listened to it two or three times, thought "meh, that was alright" then promptly forgot about it but for the most part, this one's just dull I'm afraid. If anything, it's kind of like a worrying precursor to the age of bands like the Foo Fighters and latter day Red Hot Chili Peppers - well played and proficient but very anonymous. I remember the great and good Pepsi Sheen from Sleazegrinder brilliantly once described bands like this as the sort of groups who desperately try not to alienate anyone by only kind-of-sucking and I think that's a very good way of putting it.

Either way, that would pretty much be it for me and Incubus - by the time of their next album, 2008's Light Grenades, my music tastes had moved on by quite some way and it completely passed me by. Looking at things I suspect I wasn't the only one as it missed the Top 50, definitely a bit of a comedown from the previous two. As I say though, Incubus are still out there and still doing well over in their homeland. But Morning View and especially Wish You Were Here (which I've got fond memories of listening to sat on the beach in Newquay watching the sunset while drinking a few ice cold beers many years ago) will always at least hold a few fond memories for me so for that at least, they deserve a mention in this 'ere column.