Incubus goes from H.S. to the Family Values Tour
By BRIAN KORNMANN
Scene Music Critic
Usually, success does not come quickly in the music industry. Most bands struggle underground for years before they finally get their big break. REM, Less Than Jake, Nirvana and Face to Face are perfect examples.
For the band Incubus, success came in a different way. Five high school friends formed the Calabasas, Calif., band in 1991, and like many young bands, started playing mainly small clubs and birthday parties. The band's popularity grew quickly, due to its great live show and unique sound.
In 1996, only two years out of high school and with two EPs under its belt, the band was signed to Sony's Immortal Records (Korn, the Urge). Incubus put together a "best of" collection from its two EPs and released the album Enjoy Incubus in January 1997.
Despite being an excellent album, Enjoy Incubus did not sell well and was ignored by radio stations. But the band kept busy writing and recording songs for its first full-length record, S.C.I.E.N.C.E., for Immortal Records, which was released in October 1997. It met the same fate as its previous release, however, and the band was once again passed over in records stores and on radio.
Things began to change for the band once the Family Values tour kicked off in late 1997. Incubus was the opening band for a leg of tour that featured Korn, Ice Cube and Limp Bizkit. As the tour went on, Incubus began drawing rave reviews and by the end of the tour the song "New Skin" started making the rounds on college radio stations across the United States. In addition to this, Incubus had sold 200,000 copies of its old albums and developed a large fan base.
The band took a break from touring in 1998 to begin work on its third major release, Make Yourself. The album perfectly combines the funky electronic sound featured on Enjoy Incubus with the heavy-metal industrial sound found in S.C.I.E.N.C.E., making it by far the band's best release.
Make Yourself opens with the hard-hitting song "Privilege," which sounds similar to Korn's "Got the Life." The album only gets better from there. Scratching and mixing by DJ Kilmore is featured, most effectively in the four-minute epic "Battlestar Scralatchtica."
In addition to hard rock and techno, Incubus gets a little funky on the album. The songs "Consequence," "The Warmth" and "Pardon Me" sound like some of Incubus' early funk songs such has "Hilikus" and "Azwethinkweiz."
The song layout on Make Yourself is a big reason why the album is so good. There are no blocks of songs that sound alike. Instead, Incubus mixes the genres of hard rock, techno and funk evenly throughout the album, making it a very fun record to listen to and showing how much the band has improved in such a short period of time.
Make Yourself will appeal to fans of Korn and Limp Bizkit the most, but it is such a good album that most everyone will also find it very enjoyable.
Feedback welcome at Kornmann.1@nd.edu
All Scene Stories for Tuesday, November 16, 1999
