Incubus
If Not Now, When?

In the long run, a machine ends up breaking down, no matter how much you've paid for it or how much you believed in it. That's the feeling I have for Incubus. To be honest, it's not that recent, it's been 10 years, with ups and downs, hopes for a comeback or visceral evolution, and crazy style declines. I discovered them through an additional disc attached to "Life Is Peachy" by Korn, which featured a live explosive version of "Hilikus," and it caught my attention, prompting me to rush to the (former) record shop in my city to purchase the gems "Fungus Amongus" and "S.C.I.E.N.C.E.," stuff that was mind-blowing. Sure, I realized the audacity with which Brandon Boyd mimicked his magnificence sir Mike Patton from the golden days of Mr. Bungle, without ever reaching even half of his alien expressiveness, but what I felt back then was pure joy and power, deeply into this crossover genre. So I dared to buy "Make Yourself," and again, shouts of joy, there was maturity and tracks to get lost in. Then came "Morning View." And from there, we return to the start of the review, the machine is broken, it hasn't completely stopped moving, but it does so with such slowness that it feels like it's going nowhere, and except for a few truly beautiful singles (so terribly repetitive and self-serving), there was no turning back. And so we come to this new work, "If Not Now, When?"; I ask myself that too, but the answer I give is "NEVER."

The album opens with the title track, a mixture of pop ugliness at remarkable levels with a seriously sickly sweet vocal melody, no peaks of the beauty of the good old days, tuneless warbles and boring string inserts, and the same thing happens until the third track ("Friends And Lovers"), so much so that they seem to be part of the same suite of terrible ugliness, and even the sounds... I'm surprised that sound guru Brendan O'Brien produced such drum sounds, but it's the case. It seems to move a bit more with "Isadore" with a hopeful melody, acoustic and electric guitar interplays dear to Einziger since "Drive," more dynamic, and the melody improves, the choirs are well-designed, but it's the edge of the abyss, another three terrible tracks, including the 7-minute suite "In The Company Of Wolves", where they attempt to retrace the hallucinogenic grounds of their mushroom-filled beginnings resulting in sickly sweetness, sounds lost in the space of a yawn, and it's not with a vocal filter that we will reach the shores of Mars' Turn. Pushing a bit more on the Patton-esque mimicry accelerator with "Switchblade" is useless, which live might attempt to get people moving. And as usual, a single saves the day, so to speak, and that's "Adolescent", the only true shining point of the batch, in a terrain of visceral boredom at its zenith.

I understand that at 35 years old, you can't be as impetuous as 15 years earlier, but that doesn't mean that perhaps what's missing is the ability to renew oneself, at this point, better to quit.