No wonder the critics were torn - you want to sneer at Poetry 101 lines like “deeper than the deepest Cousteau would ever go” and “the ocean looks like a thousand diamonds strewn across a blue blanket,” but Boyd is just so sincere and somehow also self-aware.
This is their Don-Draper-Coke-commercial moment. It makes sense that this album was recorded in Malibu of all places if Incubus sounded any more blissed, they’d already be on a commune. For every heavy-handed cut and chorus, there is a mellowed-out exhale neither sonic pole overpowers the other. But there is an intentional push-pull effect on Morning View.
(Sidebar: I caught Incubus’ Make Yourself anniversary tour in 2019, and I’m pleased to assure you, Boyd can still wail.) “Under My Umbrella” and “Blood On The Ground” go as hard as anything on their 1997 major-label debut S.C.I.E.N.C.E. Opener and single “Nice To Know You” clicks right into gear with a charging chorus perfectly suited to Boyd’s howl. Like its predecessors, Morning View has sharp edges. Renting a house in Malibu near where they grew up in Calabasas, the band hunkered down and spent the next six months pushing the limits of their sound. But Brandon Boyd, guitarist Mike Einziger, bassist Dirk Lance, drummer Jose Pasillas, and turntable artist Chris Kilmore, pivoted ever so slightly. A less-experienced band (Incubus actually formed 10 years before Morning View came out) might have caved to the pressure and simply spat out another Make Yourself. After Make Yourself, mainstream outlets like MTV were watching and listening, poised to pounce on the next hit.
INCUBUS BAND COVER PLUS
1999’s Make Yourself, home to the aforementioned “Drive” plus “Stellar” and “Pardon Me,” went double platinum in the US, setting the stage for an equally successful follow-up. I should know - I was one of them.īut back to those critics for a moment: There was a tendency to want to dismiss Incubus as being the equivalent of a blacklight poster in your brother’s dorm room, a Doors cover band fronted by a poor man’s Jim Morrison, the musical version of a one-hitter pipe. Sure, Incubus’ earliest work went Deftones-hard, but then you also had acoustic, mid-tempo ballads like “Drive” and a gentle, oft-shirtless lead singer, and, welp, now the pop kids who loved *NSYNC and Britney could rock out a little too. Incubus were not quite as easy to categorize, though goodness knows promoters tried, frequently dumping them in the nu-metal bucket on the festival circuit.
The Strokes were only juuuust getting around to putting their nonchalant, retrofied spin on the genre, and for the six-ish years prior, a successful radio rock band was probably going to be lumped in with Korn, Disturbed, Limp Bizkit, Drowning Pool, and the rest of the Ozzfest lineup. As has been unendingly discussed, especially now with all of these other era-adjacent anniversaries, rock music was a tricky subject in the late ’90s and early 2000s. With two decades of hindsight, it’s kind of funny to notice how at war with themselves music critics seemed regarding Incubus, especially by the time the unapologetically SoCal troupe released their fourth studio album, Morning View.
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