Incubus - A Crow Left of the Murder

Welcome to 2004. Highlights include landing fancy dune buggies on Mars, finding out the US was wrong about weapons of mass destruction and that we have a secret torture prison (don't worry, we'll find out we have many more in the future), Reagan dies, and 4 goddamned more years of W. 

Musically speaking, it's turning to shit. Don't get me wrong, there are some amazing albums from 2004 that i don't own, but mostly it's bands that aren't popular yet, best of albums for no reason, the first trickle of albums about how much we hated W, and the rest of the world is pretty sick of us as well. Bottle's collection begins in February with Incubus. 

I don't like A Crow Left of the Murder. It's too long, it's completely unfocused, the concept evaporates after 3 songs, and how can you be nu-metal if you aren't in some identifiable way metal? Turntables and occasional fast words? Is Beck nu-metal? He had two of the damned things and he's closer to rap than most actual nu-metal bands. 

Incubus is noise rock. Not heavy/sarcastic alternative noise rock, but rock songs with sound effects in the background. They are quite good at it. I like incubus a lot. That's why i don't like this album. I should like it. It has all my favorite ingredients, but we start off with Megalomaniac (a fantastic opener), and every single second after that feels like mind numbing drudgery. Why did i spend the last 58 minutes listening to it? 

I think Incubus is a one song at a time band, they write interesting, often great songs, but their albums feel like found object collages to me. Maybe it would be fine if there wasn't a clear concept for the album, but no indication whatsoever which character is the estranged crow with a hole through his body, we just assume it's Brandon. 

Was 2004 more like 1984 than now? Was it more like 1984 than the other times we said it's like 1984. Does the sort of inverted Philip K. Dick reference even matter? Or Caesar? Or history repeating? It's not like this is a "paranoid" album, or even an album about hypocrisy and delusional contentment. It's nonsense actually, when you combine it all together they cancel each other out. How can you be outside the group if the group is defined by the false facade of the self righteous pursuit of comfort? If you're raising android sheep in an attempt to appear like you're participating in clinging on to humanity, then it's safe to assume that everyone else is too, so why even pretend? So again, why even make this 5th album? 

I'm totally not like those people who aren't like those people who it turns out are all the same because we're all just pretending. The group kills the individual, the individual either turns into a power hungry monster or a wastoid. Either way we're doomed, right? 2004 is a big year for that, for some reason. 

We're off to a slow start, i know, but the next 10 albums get much better.

Part 2