Crows left of the mainstream

Aflashback: Almost two years ago, I interviewed Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger for PULP over the phone. The guys from Incubus were in Hobart, Australia, promoting the "Morning View" album, and Einziger was backstage, minutes before their Tasmanian gig. I couldn’t get past the fact that Mike was one easy-going, well-grounded fellow. Even if he was the guitarist behind those stellar, oft-kilter guitar parts in Incubus’ heavy funk numbers, spacey love songs and offbeat odes to spontaneous combustion. No airs about him as he talked about records as snapshots of where artists are in a particular period of time.

"‘Morning View’ is another point in our musical journey," he said. "Selling a lot of records, getting huge airplay – you run the risk of becoming less valid. That has happened to a lot of bands. In our case, we want to move forward, we want to evolve."

The band’s follow-up to the breakthrough album "Make Yourself" (featuring Drive, which both poseurs and genuine rockers love) yielded stripped-down, simplified, mellower, and more sophisticated numbers. The songs simmered with acoustic guitar textures and harmonies (not unlike the ditties penned by Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains when they unplugged their axes); rather than snapped, crackled and popped with the funk-metal thunder and science-fiction guitars of ‘95’s "Fungus Amongus" and ‘97’s "S.C.I.E.N.C.E," an Incubus album featuring vocals, guitar, bass, drums, turntable, didgeridoo, djembe, walkie-talkie and other experimental instruments.

"In ‘Morning View’, our focus was on the vocals and lyrics and how they work with the chords – since we have a singer who sings so well," Einziger explained. A statement backed up by lilting, languid tracks on the album like 11 a.m., Echo and Aquaeous Transmission.

According to the guitarist, lots of musicians are preoccupied with playing technical. "What we did on ‘Morning View’ was to give attention to every detail and not get caught up in showing off. We could always go hyper-technical on the next one."

Dear Young Star readers, Incubus just went hyper-technical on "A Crow Left of the Murder," the band’s latest release from Sony Music.

At first, I thought Incubus got bit by the garage band bug when I listened to Megalomaniac, a diatribe against the tribe of Bush and other warmongers. The chorus had a chunky, punk-rocky, White Stripe-y feel to it, as vocalist Brandon Boyd sings, "Hey megalomaniac, you’re no Jesus/Yeah, you’re no f*cking Elvis/Wash your hands clean of yourself, baby/And step down! Step down! Step down!" (Same vibe as Fell in Love with a Girl – Jack and Meg’s version, not the bastardized, pseudo-soul cover we see and hear lately on music channels.)

Minimalist, my foot! My misimpression was corrected when I listened to the other tracks in the new album such as Sick Sad Little World and Pistola. In "A Crow," the guys of Incubus delve into exciting hyper-technical shit, and yet they still, uh, rock.

First, a query: Is Sick Sad Little World dedicated to their former bassist Dirk Lance? The lines give that away: The world is a drought when out of love/ Please come back to us, you’re all of the above/"I’m making a choice to be out of touch… Leave me be," he said/"Leave me here in my stark, raving sick, sad little world." Maybe I’m reading too much into the lyrics. Or maybe not…

Too bad Lance left, since he’s one of the underrated bassists in rock. Just listen to his low-end work on Deep Inside from "S.C.I.E.N.C.E" and Are You In? from "Morning View." Let’s see what the guy from The Roots can do in the Manila gig.

Anyway, the Sick Sad Little World (all 6:23 minutes of it) is a syncopated rock/funk/punk track characterized by atmospheric guitars courtesy of Einziger. Mind-blowing solo, by the way. What is he playing, anyway, pentatonic Chinese scales? And I have no clue what effects box he’s using. All I know is that they guy has orchestrated his solo in Sick well.

Pistola starts out like Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive (as far as the feedbacking guitar goes). It morphs into a signature Incubus number. (I just dig the way Brandon sings, "On the tip of my tongue an offensive is poised and rearing/My intention a bullet! My body a trigger finger!") And it then transforms into a Rush instrumental, with the middle part conjuring images of the Canadian trio jamming on Limelight. Listen closely, dudes. Stop surfing the Net for album reviews, and listen to the damn thing.

Stellar tracks A Crow Left of the Murder, Agoraphobia and Leech will make listeners reminisce about the time when rock n’ roll was big, brawny, brooding, and so very screwed-up. It helps that Brendan O’Brien manned the switches for this record; his production credits include albums by Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

On the other hand, Southern Girl and Here In My Room are slow songs, quite poppy. I really dig Here In My Room because of its gothic piano, which reminds me of Faith No More, one of the best rock bands ever. Talk Shows On Mute is in a class all its own. What clever lyrics: Still and transfixed/The electric sheep are dreaming of your face/Enjoy you from the chemical/Comfort of America/Come one, come all/Into Nineteen Eighty-Four/Yeah, three, two, one…Lights! Camera! Transaction…

Come to think of it, so is the whole of "A Crow Left of the Murder" – so very cleverly written and executed. And I think Incubus is not done redefining itself, or discovering new and exciting paths to make music.

Yeah, as Brandon Boyd puts it, "Even straight roads meander."

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‘Bitches Brew’ And Other Meanderings

A reader is asking about jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, particularly that hallucinogenic album of his titled "Bitches Brew." Man, writing about that seminal record is like describing death by drowning, the face of God, or a soul-sucking orgasm. I made an attempt a year ago in PULP magazine (thanks, Vernon). So here goes:

One day, I woke up and decided to write about Miles Davis’ "Bitches Brew," or something tangential. Why should I be writing about "Was Music," the boys in cornrows and dreadlocks and with stereos blasting Crazy Town or Simple Plan might wonder. Miles Davis’ bitchy aural brew cannot be classified as "Was Music" because it never was "Is Music" in the first place. People haven’t really begun to comprehend the music that the lonely and narcissistic, beautiful and unbearable Miles Davis and his merry band of heady gypsies created in a three-day session in 1969.

What the hell is "Bitches Brew" all about?

It is beyond our shabby, beggarly understanding of music because it transcends all our notions of what jazz, what rock, what music, what art was supposed to be. The way inscrutable artists like Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Frank Zappa, Ornette Coleman and Friedrich Nietzsche fingered our brains into impossible orgasms. Joyce’s dreamy prose in Finnegan’s Wake is still beyond human comprehension. Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra has the same zip code as Stonehenge. So do Frank Zappa’s "Lumpy Gravy" and "Uncle Meat." (Maybe somebody could explain to me what The Dog Breath Variations or Eric Dolphy’s Memorial Barbecue from "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" is all about.) But absolutely nobody can offer us an idiot’s guide to cutting-edge, off-kilter music because we must hear our own way.

It’s not like Get The Party Started or Sk8ter Boi or an American Idol ditty where one doesn’t need a goddamn explanation.

Trying to make sense of Miles’ "Bitches" album or Francis Bacon’s "Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion" is like trying to define God. What we have done so far is define the divine in faulty human terms. God is merciful. God is just. God will let loose fire, brimstone and everything apocalyptic upon the wicked of the world. God will put the righteous in the swanky and very, very exclusive Country Club in the Sky; and all the rest shall fry. How very Freudian: We have created God in the image and likeness of our dear old dads – the ones with the whip and the fat wallet.

I’d like to think we haven’t blown our minds or expanded our consciousness enough to really grasp the transcendent. We haven’t really understood what to be human, all-too human is in the first place and we poor jerk-offs want to figure out all the ineffable holies that are not of this world. A world where one-year-old babies get raped, where one race puts another in huge slaughterhouses, and where capitalist pigs suck the blood off the veins of proletarian pigs. To hell with what the televangelists say. To hell with what the critics say about "Bitches Brew." Although some of them raised valid points about the music. In the "Bitches" liner notes, Ralph Gleason quotes Lenny Bruce: "There is only what is and that’s a good place to start."

I woke up one day and dredged up all my books, magazines, record sleeves with testaments from guitarist Carlos Santana, keyboardist Chick Corea, guitarist John McLaughlin and Quincy Troupe (Miles’ biographer), among others – everything that touched on those almost-mystical "Bitches Brew" sessions. I ditched all that and just played the album and let the mind drift along to the celestial keyboards in Pharoah’s Dance, the chaotic guitars in John McLaughlin, the psychedelic grooves of Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, which is like Jimi Hendrix splitting yage with Carlos Castaneda, James Brown and Sun Ra. And I wrote this article while I listened to "Bitches," which is… what? Jazz-fusion? Ambient be-bop? Electric Miles? Alien church music? Hey, whatever it is, it is so damn good.

So I did some automatic writing sound-tracked by Miles Davis running the voodoo down. Either all this comes across to you as nonsense or something scrawled with the pure wisdom of someone who knows absolutely nothing.

Miles rules!

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I hope no megalomaniac ruins the Incubus gig for us tonight at the CCP Open Grounds. For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.