There’s a good EP somewhere inside Incubus’ latest album, If Not Now, When?, but, unfortunately, If Not Now, When? is a full-length LP, and the majority of it is dead weight. There’s some wheat here, but not nearly enough to excuse the mountains of chaff you have to suffer through to get to it.
It’s unfortunate, but Incubus’ highest-charting singles have always been their most insipid; soggy ballads “Drive” and “Love Hurts” have fared much better commercially than solid guitar-rock tracks like “Anna Molly” and “Megalomaniac.” Incubus has never been a great band, but the members are at their best when they’re simply a bunch of guys rocking out.
But commerce trumps all, so If Not Now, When? is the band’s most soporific outing to date. It’s filled with the kind of sleepy songs that have sold well for the band in the past, only somehow made even duller. It’s like listening to Coldplay on NyQuil.
The album opens with the title track, which sets the tone for almost everything that follows. It’s well-produced and would make for fine, if forgettable, filler on another, more energetic album, but it’s just too goddamn bland to work as the statement of purpose for a whole album. It’s the kind of music you expect to hear in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, and some novocaine would certainly make it easier to get through.
After that, Incubus essentially repeats the same song five more times. Each track proceeds along at the same plodding tempo, with the same piano-and-strings accompaniment and the same cloying lyrics that get increasingly stupid as the album progresses (“Baby can I be the rabbit in your hat/ I’d swing if you’d hand me, hand me the bat”).
If there’s any redeeming value to this snooze-fest, it’s vocalist Brandon Boyd. To put it simply, the guy can sing. Sure, he over-emotes, but his voice has power and range enough to lend the drippy melodies some weight.
The album begins to show some promise after the halfway mark. Most of “The Original” is just as asinine as everything that precedes it, but it builds to an effective climax of thundering guitars in the last minute and a half, and its follow-up, acoustic number “Defiance,” earns points for brevity, if nothing else.
It’s really only halfway through the seven-and-a-half-minute track “In the Company of Wolves” that the album takes off. The first three minutes of the song are perhaps the most boring on the whole record (and feature such lyrical gems as “I was low but now I am high/ It helps to know serenity from ennui,” with “ennui” pronounced “enn-yoo-eye”).
But then, around the song’s midpoint, all the familiar elements drop away, leaving only a soundscape weird and moodily atmospheric enough to earn positive comparisons to Massive Attack.
From there on, the album picks up considerably. “Switchblade” finally moves at a pace other than narcoleptic, and also features guitarist Mike Einziger playing like he means it for the first time. “Adolescents” also feels like a return to “classic” Incubus — which is to say not great, but good enough for major-label guitar-rock.
Closing track “Tomorrow’s Food” returns to the experimentalism of “In the Company of Wolves.” With its arpeggiated guitars, ambient orchestration and echo chamber vocals, it clearly wishes it was an unreleased track from Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Of course, it falls far short of that mark, but it’s legitimately lovely and features the album’s best (read: adequate) songwriting.
As relatively strong as these last tracks are, it’s too little, too late. Fifteen minutes of B-level work isn’t enough to justify the half-hour of C-level blandness that precedes it. If Not Now, When? has its successful moments, but as an album, it’s best used as a sleep aid.
RATING: 2 stars out of 5
diversions@umdbk.com
