A Crow Left of the Murder...
Megalomaniac gives A Crow Left of the Murder... a restless opening. Its shift into a hard guitar song feels confrontational, and Brandon Boyd uses a sharper edge in his voice to match it. Incubus sound interested in friction here, both within the songs and between their different approaches.
Brendan O'Brien's production helps by keeping the instruments distinct. A heavy passage can turn into something more rhythmically loose without becoming a blur of effects. Mike Einziger's guitar is especially lively, moving between firm chords and lines that seem to search for another route through the song.
Sick Sad Little World gives that impulse room to develop. Its extended instrumental movement is an attraction in its own right, but the track retains enough of a melodic centre to bring the wandering back into focus. The band's ability to move together makes the changes feel purposeful. This is ambitious playing that still belongs to a song.
The title track has a more immediate appeal, with a chorus strong enough to hold its place among the album's more complicated turns. Agoraphobia also shows how well Boyd can make an accessible melody fit the record's uneasy mood. He does more than sing forcefully; his changing tone helps define the space around each tune.
Southern Girl provides a gentler contrast, allowing the voice and guitar to work at a smaller scale. Zee Deveel takes a different kind of detour, giving the rhythm a swinging movement. The variety is convincing because the band play each approach with commitment, rather than adding a brief decoration to an otherwise unchanged rock song.
The sequence is less persuasive than the individual pieces. Some changes in mood feel abrupt, and the album does not build toward its finish as strongly as the opening suggests it might. That limits its sense of a shared destination.
Still, the record contains some of Incubus' most interesting work. It combines direct choruses with instrumental passages that have their own momentum and curiosity. The occasional rough join is a reasonable price for music that keeps finding different ways to move, with Sick Sad Little World as the clearest example of that confidence.
