How Incubus’ Morning View Was an Alternate Timeline for Nü-Metal

Incubus have always seemed like good guys, especially for kinda-spoiled, bit-pretentious Cali beach bums and nü-metal satellites.

Resourceful, too; if I could’ve poached The Roots’ new guitarist hot on the heels of “The Seed (2.0)” to take over bassist duties, I would’ve too. Before Death Grips made a show of sampling Björk, Brandon Boyd would crow about her to any rockmag that would listen, while his own jazzy, wayward vocalizations easily bore the strongest Ani DiFranco influence of any 2000s rocker. Eyerolly as the hemp-and-shell-necklace type of sensitive longhair who never finishes a show with his shirt on can be, Boyd’s band has assembled more good songs than they have any right to, and about twice as many other cool riffs, hooks and spare parts that they weren’t necessarily savvy enough to build great tunes around; see also 311, their closest spiritual analogues being drunk on positively-positive spiritual hard rock that pulls in all kinds of non-metal influences. Incubus are a little smarter and a lot more smart-ass, but you can certainly hear their rap-rock forebears on a track like “Blood on the Ground.”

I can’t write about Incubus without setting aside a couple grafs to rave about their sole masterpiece, which is not Morning View. Their 1997 major-label debut S.C.I.E.N.C.E. is so great that it even transcends the fact it’s by far their heaviest and most rap-metal album. Except for Boyd’s weakness for hectoring self-helpisms (anti-TV screed “Idiot Box” is a mite embarrassing from the same year that gave us the dystopian-devo special OK Computer), S.C.I.E.N.C.E. never lets up for a second from vocals more hiccupped than rapped, riffs that never stop bursting into twisted fractals (try the weird pinball in the verses of “New Skin”), and beats that could hang with Roni Size. It’s like the best Faith No More album you’ve ever heard remixed by Aphex Twin, with so many ear-catching effects in tunes like “Vitamin,” “Glass” and the especially Ipecac-ready “Nebula” that you can’t catch every frenetic hook with just two ears.

I’ve always been inclined to blame the loss of DJ Lyfe on why the band lost their groove seemingly overnight for the conventional fare of 1999 breakthrough Make Yourself, because I’ve never heard an album where a band got more use out of their DJ. Peace to Chris Kilmore, but his contributions to Incubus’ later efforts feel so much more pasted-on, a wiki-wiki here or boom-bap loop on their biggest hit, “Drive,” there. By contrast, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. has limitless energy and possibility, with the band’s sense of humor intact, as well as their funk pedigree. With exceptions for a few born-ready singles, especially the great “Stellar,” Make Yourself is overly self-conscious, plodding and less fun in every way. Couldn’t have disappointed me more in high school.

Morning View, the band’s best-selling album (popularity is funny with this band; 2006’s Light Grenades holds the record for the swiftest drop for a number-one record) refines their “mature” approach and course-corrects a little better than I remembered. I’m not actually sure if it’s their most popular album, it comes off half-like one of those follow-ups with the best chart position, a.k.a. the AC/DC rule, coming on the heels of the word-of-mouth-ish sleeper hit Make Yourself. On the other hand, “Wish You Were Here” and “Warning” were ubiquitous alt-radio staples in their own right. If anything, the blissed-out victory-lap vibe has a meta AC/DC rule-celebrating vibe in itself, one that’s especially rare in angsty hard rock. Namely: We were successful and now we are happy.

Not that Incubus were ever especially angry; the furious lectures “Make Yourself” and “Nowhere Fast” shared space with the moonswept “I Miss You” and the Galactic fusion-squawk showcase “Battlestar Scralatchtica.” This was always a band that made full use of the sonic rainbow, lyrically, too. They were openly dismayed with the “harsh” lyrics and downcast vibes of grayscale tourmates. While I’d cut their power ballad stash by two-thirds, they still put the rhythmic prowess of hard-rock radio peers to shame; “Pardon Me” alone contains more drum’n’bass in its DNA than, well…who was there to compare? 3 Doors Down? Nickelback? Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park showed real joy for their hip-hop favorites but those were often sidebars and token cuts for their DJs and rappers. Incubus, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes deftly, for better or worse, always blended it all together.

Morning View is not their most novel record; the opening plow of “Nice to Know You” turns out to be a chorus that could’ve come from plenty of other bands, though I’m partial to that harmonized “goodbye” hook. But soon it gives way to a trippy, tricky jungle rhythm and a Cousteau namedrop and it’s to their credit that you know which band this is. “Are You In?” was a clever choice for a single, just an airy little funk workout to give their looser side some airplay. Even the album’s minor-key moments like the apocalyptic churn “Warning” feature bits like Boyd’s layered and R&B-buttered falsetto on the pre-chorus.

So the unabashed splendor of “Wish You Were Here” hits harder than you remember when that chorus smacks like the perfect wave, and for once Boyd’s pretensions become the charms themselves. The lyrics are so tryhard they’re endearing: “The sky resembles a backlit canopy with holes punched in it.” Then to match, he sings way too many notes on that hook, to an impressive degree, like an oscillating synth or overdriven Autotune bleeding out, voice unthreading to just weird note-ribbons, syllables stretched into harmonized beautiful nonsense that simply no one else could sing, over just three chords pounded into the sand. He sounds grateful and content and still showing off what he can do. I thought it was pretty good in 2001. In a world increasingly being overtaken by AI, I’m softer on idiosyncratic prog quirks; the song hits like raw fireworks now. 

And my two favorites on Morning View have always honored the “concept,” if you want to call it that, the whole New Age-y deprivation tank thing. “Echo” and “Aqueous Transmission” are simply Incubus’ most beautiful songs, and they’re keynoted by minor riff genius Mike Einziger’s fascination with Asian scales. The former would fit just fine on Dismemberment Plan’s plaintive Change. The latter’s got it all: strings, flutes, trip-hop beat programming, and a perfect loop of a pipa gifted to Einziger from Steve Vai. All of which avoid their fitful tempo-shifting tendencies for eight sweet minutes I wish they’d make more of.

Revisiting the catalog after I stopped paying attention wasn’t much of a revelation though; Morning View and 2004’s more claustrophobic and politicized A Crow Left of the Murder sounded better. Make Yourself crushed me less because I’ve long made peace with the fact they were only one of my favorite bands for one album cycle. S.C.I.E.N.C.E. continues to blow my mind long after junior high. And I checked out 2006’s Light Grenades for the first time; nope. Hopelessly conventional, though I’ve always loved the tensely melodic “Anna-Molly” no matter how pro forma; it’s everything the mainstream version of Incubus does best in under four minutes (and it’s got a hammer dulcimer).

VIDEO: Incubus “Wish You Were Here”

So where Morning View, for me, represented the final creative gasps of a once-promising band fully in thrall to the mainstream-rock audience, I can view it with some of their pet positivity as they prepare to release a fully remade version in early 2024 (hey, the anniversary’s already been delayed two years, what’s one more? COVID brought out our collective “who cares”/YOLO impulses). I wish there were more almost-bangers (“4am”) than nothing-specials (“Mexico”) but I can view the album as a nice if somewhat birdbrained vision of aggro-alternative that progressed into the unknown, balancing sweetness with ADHD dynamics and, if not actual femininity, at least a rebuke of the testosterone-choked smarm that Boyd was holding over from his stint on the Family Values Tour.

Really, though, you gotta hear S.C.I.E.N.C.E. Being a djembe-straddling smartass brought the energy and funk out of the guy and his beatwise cohorts like you wouldn’t imagine. Wish you were there.

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Ted Miller

Ted Miller is trying to collect the head of every Guns ‘n Roses’ guitarist for his rec room. He currently has three.

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