If Not Now, When?

RELEASE
July 12, 2011
LABEL
Immortal
GENRES
Pop/Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock, Heavy Metal, Alternative Metal, Rap-Metal, Funk Metal, Alternative/Indie Rock

Album Review

Seizing their extended half-decade hiatus as an opportunity to reinvent themselves, Incubus dive headfirst into a comfortable middle age on their seventh album, If Not Now, When? This is no crisis, this is deliberate: with the assistance of producer Brendan O’Brien, they’ve turned down the guitars and ratcheted up the synthesizers, trading roiling angst for occasional spells of moodiness, deciding to settle into a warm, textured adult pop that occasionally recalls nothing so much as Neil Finn at his spaciest. Incubus aren’t completely ready to become an AAA act -- they’re spry enough to sound convincing on the clatter of “Switchblade,” the guitars don’t soothe so much as evoke desolate landscapes, vocalist Brandon Boyd still favors some unsettling lyrical imagery -- but the end result is an album on a shaded, comfortable grayscale, music that’s suitably mature yet sidesteps stultifying notions of middlebrow class.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

Track Listing

  1. If Not Now, When?
  2. Promises, Promises
  3. Friends and Lovers
  4. Thieves
  5. Isadore
  6. The Original
  7. Defiance
  8. In the Company of Wolves
  9. Switchblade
  10. Adolescents
  11. Tomorrow's Food