ROT2000: Light Grenades

Like Coldplay or the Dave Matthews Band, Incubus have paid for their success by becoming one of those bands that music snobs hate. To be fair, the alt-rock quintet began as a rap-metal band from Calabasas, CA, a city that also counts Britney Spears and the Kardashians as citizens. It would be easy to dismiss Incubus as a bunch of rich, metal-loving, snot-nosed dorks, whose success and good looks were coincidental proof that we really are in the end times. But 1999's evolved--if straight-forward--Make Yourself showed that Incubus could take their art seriously, as was illustrated by the success of their pop single "Drive."

Following Make, Incubus took the kitchen sink approach to serious music-making. They honed their pop chops on Morning View and dug into sprawling prog on A Crow Left of the Murder, all while maintaining a tight and appealing (but spazmatic) heavy rock sound. As the band scrambled to mature, a generation of fans got their kicks and moved on, leaving Incubus to deliver 2006's Light Grenades, their career masterwork, for which the band recieved one of the most dubious honors in pop music (click and scroll down).

Light Grenades falls just short of Coldplay's Viva la Vida in term's of bleak timeliness. 2006 will be remembered as the year we were barely half-way through the most turbulent decade since the 1960's. Appropriately, "A Kiss to Send Us Off" is just vague enough to seem to be about a government that dragged its feet in response to Hurricane Katrina. Similarly, front man Brandon Boyd foretells the need to stick together in bad times on "Dig."

But it's on the neck-snapping title track that Incubus' snarky intelligence takes flight. "We're given a garden/and gave back a parking lot./We got about fifteen minutes to go!" Boyd sneers in a way you guess Zach De La Rocha might if he lightened up a skotch. Boyd notes Humanity's accomplishments and implores us,  "C'mon, remember who you are!" He's not just another guy in the ranks of other disillusioned swing voters of the time. He's an ideological freight train. And his electric guitarist cohort Mike Einziger uses a playfully raw lick to drive the train off the rails.

Incidental politics aside, what becomes clear as the rest of the album unfolds is that Incubus have not just transcended being a rap metal band. They've transcended being a period band. Sure, they've got their quirks--the Bopper mag looks, the shameless sensitivity, the occasionally cringeworth lyric--but strip away those things and you'll find a deeply serious team of rock craftsmen. Incubus possess all the chops of Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Wilco, or any other band with cred coming out of their asses.

Don't believe me? Pop the disc in and note the Yorke-like keyboards that carry "Quicksand" to a Greenwood-ian string arrangement (a year before the Radiohead guitarist scored There Will Be Blood!) that segues into "A Kiss..." Or skip to "Earth to Bella (Part 1)" and hum the vampy accordion harmony until the band teleports to an explosion of smirky rock noise and back again. Bear witness to Boyd's split-second vocal inflexions on "Anna Molly." Or just, listen to the easy give-and-take of drummer Jose Passillas and bassist Ben Kenney, who spend the album going wherever Einziger's guitar schizophrenia takes them. 

That all said, it's sad to know that this record is likely ignored by the masses who flocked to Make Yourself, Morning View, and A Crow... On Light Grenades, Incubus sound like elder statesmen at a time in their careers when other artists would be staging a comeback. Here's hoping that their hiatus won't be much longer...

Comments

[Megan]

I wouldn't necessarily say they are on hiatus because they just went on tour and I was ever so lucky to seem them play in Austin this past August. I also got to stand dumbly in front of them and shake their hands. They have come out with a CD entitled Monuments and Melodies which is a collection of some of their greatest hits, a new song, and unreleased songs, and they says it's not necessarily a "this is it, we are done" kind of thing. They say that it's just another stepping stone in their career. I love Make Yourself and Morning View but I have to say I don't disregard Light Grenades. In fact Anna Molly is one of my favorite songs (which you are aware of Adam) Bravo on talking about a bad ass band :)