Sony
2006
Light Grenades
About This Album
On their fourth album, A Crow Left of the Murder, Incubus got heavier, both musically and lyrically, which might have developed their music but it shrank their audience. It's hard not to see their 2006 follow-up, Light Grenades, as a reaction to this situation -- not that they shrink away from the progression of Crow, but they polish and streamline their innovations from that album, resulting in a record that's sharper, cleaner, and more immediate in every respect. This naturally means that Incubus doesn't sound as heavy as they did earlier in their career, but they're still pretty somber here; even when the rhythms crash and the guitars wail, this is serious music, but they have a lighter touch here than they did on Crow. They also have a greater mastery of mood, as well as a greater musical variety than they displayed on the outset of their career. Often, they use trippy, vaguely psychedelic soundscapes to set a tone that they later blast apart with tightly focused blasts of fury, such as the skittering "Anna Molly" or the intense two-minute ballast of the title track -- or even how the acoustic introspection of "Earth to Bella" is ripped apart by shards of noise, not unlike Radiohead's "Creep.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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