album review: brandon boyd, the wild trapeze

Like many front men of successful bands before him, Brandon Boyd has released a solo album after almost two decades with Incubus. Although ‘The Wild Trapeze’ is not his first lone venture altogether, with Boyd having released two books since 2003, this is probably his least successful one.

Comparisons to the music created by his band may not be fair, but they are inevitable, particularly as Boyd’s voice is the most recognisable feature of Incubus’s music. The stylistic similarities between the two will either come as a relief to Incubus fans that Boyd is still interested in creating their brand of sound, or a disappointment that he chose to use his band’s popularity as a platform to release music that sounds similar, but just not quite as good.

Repeated plays of the album fail to expose any tracks that are likely to permanently resonate with an audience, with only ‘Courage and Control’ and ‘Runaway Train’ emerging as semi-stand outs, although listening to the latter on headphones feels like a migraine in your ear – the switches in the song from the left to right audio channel are so frequent that it almost completely distracts the listener from an otherwise good song. The percussion over the course of the album is most prominent (aside from the vocals) but sounds like it has all been played by the same person, which it was, but unfortunately that person (Boyd) is not a percussionist by vocation.

The real gem of this production is in the liner notes, which is admittedly not a very compelling reason to buy a CD. There is no doubt that Boyd is an outstanding writer and this is likewise conveyed in the musings he shares in the accompanying booklet, but the strength of his lyrics is diluted by the amateurish music. While I would never discourage someone from “an exercise in self-reliance”, it nonetheless seems like a rather pointless exercise when your best friend has studied music at Harvard University.

Ultimately, Brandon Boyd is a better visual artist, writer and vocalist than most people in the world and this album makes a good case for skill specialisation. It’s an admirable effort, especially for Boyd to play almost all the instruments heard on the album, but the effort has not succeeded in making it much more than filler music. I suspect that the input of the other band members would almost always prevent a track from sounding like filler, a point that surely won’t go astray when all five of them next find themselves in a studio.