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Anyone hoping that the 11th-hour recruitment of Skrillex as coproducer would encourage Incubus to add vertiginous drops and bowel-shaking sub-bass to their eighth album will be disappointed. Despite that, they remain as dismissive of rock’s traditional boundaries as ever, roaming from New Wave pop (“Familiar Faces”) to dark-hearted electro-blues (“Loneliest”) and a dub/lounge-jazz mash-up (“Make No Sound in the Forest”). The Californians have never undervalued short, sharp thrills though; the riff-laden “Nimble Bastard” is exhilarating and incisive.
There’s a reason we form our closest affinities with rock and pop music during our youth. There’s something ineffably adolescent about our connections to our favorite musical artists. We may grow out of certain bands, genres, and even styles of art altogether, but the music we bond with at a young age rarely becomes a…
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With their spiritualist-tinged, beach-bum demeanour and love of a delicate chorus, California rockers Incubus always seemed something of an outlier in the nu-metal scene, less likely to Break Stuff than lightly rearrange a few items before retiring for a cup of oolong tea and a nice sit-down.
Incubus still deftly melds various styles and influences into a sound all its own.