Brandon Boyd’s new solo album, “The Wild Trapeze”

Posted by J.R.

July 11, 2010

Brandon Boyd (Incubus’ lead singer, for those of you not in my target audience) just released a solo album. In the official press release, Boyd says the music is inspired by weed. The Wild Trapeze sounded uncomfortable to me at first—the instrumentation has a washed out sound that made me think the gain was too high on my end. Nope, that’s just the production style—it’s reminiscent of stoner rock and the intention is that you feel the extra vibration.

So how’s this compare to Incubus? Well, it does and it doesn’t. “A Night Without Cars” is a stoner power ballad with cool breakdowns. Rock? Sure, that’s here, but the beginning of the album is dancier than rock, in a way that I guess I’ll call tribal. “Runaway Train” opens with guitar alternating between stereo channels in a way that makes me feel a bit nauseous, but I’m sure it would sound absolutely nuts if I were high.

I’m no music theorist, but I feel like if you give “Revenge of the Spectral Tiger” a listen it’ll be obvious to you that the lyrical ideas left in Brandon Boyd’s mind are an optimistic blend of bro’d-out stoned clichés—“death by a thousand cuts” is in the chorus and the spectral tiger himself has “porcelain teeth”. Cringe. In the next track, “Courage and Control”, Boyd declares “it’s time to let your hair down”. Thankfully these clichés sound good. If someone who couldn’t sing were belting them, I’d feel insulted.

Boyd feels more fresh when he’s not leaning heavily on his Light Grenades-era singing style. Maybe I’m just excessively biased against that album, but I preferred everything Incubus did prior to it. “All Ears Avow!” is a step in the right direction on this album; it’s concise, urgent, and reminds me of older Incubus with lyrics like “a generation of intellectual amputees / one-winged worker bees”. I can’t help but love when Brandon Boyd gets self-righteous.

Check The Wild Trapeze out. If you’re an Incubus fan you’ll like it. If you’re relatively unimpressed by the simplistic solo instrumentation, which Boyd aptly describes as “the sound of one hand clapping” when compared to his work with Incubus, you might be reassured to know that this album release signifies that Incubus is back in the studio working on their next release. Maybe we’ll see that this winter?

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