New Incubus podcast

Steve Rennie, Incubus manager, released podcast #3 today. After a few seconds of listening I found out that they would be playing clips of the album, and like I said before I didn't really want to hear the album before it came out. I managed to keep clear of the 30-second clips, but this time I caved. Basically Brandon and Mike say a few words about each track, and that was too much for me to resist. I did intend to listen to the album without any real expectation or preconceived notions but it's been agony waiting so I decided to hell with it and just listened to the podcast. I think it's awesome of them to do this kind of thing, and while I wish they had answered questions posed by the fans like they've done in previous podcasts, this was pretty special too and I'm glad of the insight into their music. It was short but very entertaining piece and it's made me a lot more excited, as much as I hate to admit.

The clips were a bit too short for me to really make too solid a judgement on, but there were some things I was really pleased to hear. I've already heard a few of the songs in acoustic or live form, and hearing the album versions was very interesting. Love Hurts sounds quite cool, the acoustic version has of course quite clean guitar, but the album version has the guitar through some effect like a flanger or something, making it a little less straightforward and more importantly making it sound less like Drive than a lot of people were worried about. I love the guitar riff to the song so I didn't mind either way. It's sounding like a pretty solid song, nothing special but a strong number on the record. Earth to Bella definitely sounds a lot better on the album, there's a heck of a lot more going on in the song that just isn't conveyed in the acoustic version, musically. I didn't think much of the fact that it was in two parts, I'd seen the lyrics to both parts and plus they were both performed acoustically as one song so I didn't think it was anything special. But listening to the clip of part two I've changed my mind quite a bit. The feel of the song seems quite different indeed, and it reminds me of the end of The Odyssey - which is a good thing. I truly miss the kind of stuff Mike was doing there, and it sounds like they've returned to that sound for the end of Earth to Bella. One thing I was glad to hear was Brandon writing some of the songs. It's good to know he writes guitar parts as well as lyrics. The vocal melodies in the clips sound great - that was pretty much the only thing I could really judge because nothing else is heard long enough. Overall it was a cool podcast, but I think I won't listen to it again until after the album comes out.