Review Summary: Comfort food for the ears... and then there's ‘Make Out Party’.
Let’s face it: Incubus had it easy with this one. Anything they could conjure up at this point would be an improvement from
If Not Now, When?. I’m one of the few who enjoyed the album, but the fact is it was safe and banal by Incubus’ standards and also birthed some of the worst songs they’ve ever written. So now they’re back with a fresh new EP, and as is usually the case with a new Incubus album, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s better than
If Not Now, When? – it’s more concise, more fun, and has a greater ratio of good to bad songs. The bad news? It has their worst song of their career. Step back, ‘Promises, Promises’: you have competition.
Trust Fall (Side A) opens with its title track and sounds like a nice return to form for the band (and by return to form I mean highlights from
A Crow…/
Light Grenades esque return to form. They’ll never be as good as they were with Dirk Lance, that’s just a given). The song has a great chorus, a quirky guitar riff, and basically everything you’d want and expect in a modern Incubus song. The only question is, why is it over six minutes long? Beats the hell out of me. Other than that, the chorus alone blows away anything from their previous release. And then track two kicks in.
‘Make Out Party’ is an abomination, plain and simple. It makes ‘Switchblade’ look like ‘Deep Inside’. It’s like the band took a botched acid trip and were like “hey, let’s make something really heavy but also really experimental and kind of artsy with lots of falsetto, and let’s throw in a random synth lead too cause that’ll be cool, right?” And this was the result. It still sounds like Incubus, but a discombobulated, not-all-there-mentally version of the band. None of the instruments mesh together, the falsetto is absolutely cringe-worthy, and the synth lead that comes in about two-thirds of the way in made me question why the hell I ever liked this band. It’s horrendous. There are some good ideas in there buried inside the sluggish mess, and I can appreciate what they were going for but they just missed the mark completely.
‘Absolution Calling’ brings things back up to speed. It’s arguably their best song since ‘Rogues’ – nothing flashy, no risks – just straightforward, catchy pop rock. And closer ‘Dance Like You're Dumb’ plays out exactly like its title suggests – silly good fun. This is the kind of band Incubus is now: Comfort food for the ears. Whether or not you can accept that is the real deciding factor on whether or not you’d like
Trust Fall (Side A). It’s an interesting collection of tracks – three catchy, fun alt rock jams, and one disgraceful misfire. But hey, the silver lining is that Incubus are still good at what they do and aren’t afraid to try new things. Hopefully Incubus find the rest of their absolution calling on
Side B.
