It was a typically balmy Wednesday night in beautiful Santa Barbara with an atypical headliner at the famed local concert hotspot. The Santa Barbara Bowl doesn’t host a lot of hard rock shows, perhaps due to volume limits in the residential neighborhood, although Incubus is a band known for a dynamic sound that stretches wider than the alt-hard rock genre is generally known for. The beautiful venue had to offer an alluring change of pace for the band after having finished a co-headlining summer tour with the Deftones that hit larger sheds and arenas.
One of the nation’s most unique venues, the Bowl provides a more intimate setting (4,500 capacity) that still feels grand with a tiered stone seating format reminiscent of the Berkeley Greek Theater and the Red Rocks Ampitheater in Colorado. The laid back Southern California lifestyle is in full effect here and with no venue parking lot to tailgate in, it was surprising how empty the local Telegraph Brewing tap room (just a mile away) was before the show.
The band wasted no time getting down to business by opening with “Wish You Were Here” from their 2001 smash Morning View LP. The song ignited the first of many crowd singalongs and was at least the second song referencing UFOs played at the venue in the past year, following Phish’s performance of “Scent of a Mule” last October. “I’m counting UFOs, I signal them with my lighter,” vocalist Brandon Boyd sings of a special night on the beach. Boyd has never been shy about his belief that Earth is being visited from afar, having spoken of personal sightings and a proclivity for UFO watching in several interviews over the years. Boyd’s wide-ranging metaphysical interests have long given Incubus a deeper thematic subtext than many of their alt-rock peers, so it’s no wonder the band is approaching their 25th anniversary next year.
“Circles” was a winning melodic hard rocker about the circular and multi-dimensional nature of reality, with bassist Ben Kenney, drummer Jose Pasillas and guitarist Mike Einziger laying down one of their sharpest grooves to get the crowd going. DJ Chris Kilmore accented the sound with some cosmic sound effects to raise the vibe higher and the only problem was the noticeably limited volume level that diminished the song’s overall impact a bit. A youthful fan that had to wear headphone earplugs at the band’s Chula Vista show (home to one of the most powerful sound systems in the country) soon found he could handle the volume level at the Bowl just fine without earplugs.
It was seemingly a necessary tradeoff to play the venue, yet the band’s sound still sparkled in the Santa Barbara night. This was particularly true on the laid back groove of “Are You In?” with its shimmering psychedelia, as Boyd invited the audience to unite with the band in collective harmony. Einziger painted one of his most gorgeous sonic landscapes here, showing a much wider playbook than most hard rock guitarists are capable of. The band’s psychedelic light show also had a dramatic and mesmerizing effect here. Incubus got back to rocking out by pairing one of their oldest songs with one of their newest with the hard-hitting “Vitamin” from their first album preceding the title track of their brand new Trustfall EP.
“Trustfall” is a hard rocker that shows the band has lost none of their edge, though it was too bad they didn’t also play the groovy and just as rocking “Dance Like Your Dumb”, a downright infectious number that closes the EP. Boyd took the band in a more theatrical direction when he donned a wolf mask with glowing eyes for “In the Company of Wolves” from 2011’s If Not Now, When? LP, a number that provided a cinematic interlude of sorts.
There was no shortage of scintillating rockers though with “Nice to Know You” and “Sick Sad Little World” igniting the night, the latter featuring one of the evening’s hottest jams as Einziger stepped out to shred some smoking riffage on the deep psychedelic bridge section. Boyd told PopMatters last year that he felt the improvisational “heavy lifting” should be left to professionals like Phish and the Grateful Dead, but the way the band was stretching out here showed that Incubus is more than capable of delivering soaring jams of their own when they set their minds to it.
The semi-prophetic “Pardon Me” from 1999’s breakthrough Make Yourself LP continued to resonate as strongly as ever in the post 9/11 era, drawing one of the evening’s strongest reactions as the crowd rocked out with Boyd while he sang of “the perils of living in 3D but thinking so much differently.” That same angst about modern society’s dystopian ways reverberated again during “Megalomaniac,” with the band rocking heavily behind Boyd as he sang out against narcissistic politicians and media personalities who fiddle while the Earth continues to burn.
The classic “Warning” was another song on this theme, with the crowd singing along cathartically with the song’s protagonist: “When will we learn, when will we change, just in time to see it all fall down…” The sentiment resonates with the work of Incubus’ Make Yourself Foundation, the band’s charitable arm. The foundation typically works with environmentally minded causes, such as a new documentary still in production called Kiss the Ground that addresses the perilous state of the planet’s soil and how addressing this issue can help combat the global climate that is threatening life on Earth as we know it.
“Dig” provided a shimmering and catchy romantic pop rock interlude before the band dug deep into the repertoire for “Calgone”, rocking fiercely on the tune from 1997’s S.C.I.E.N.C.E. LP that reflects the band’s influence from early Red Hot Chili Peppers and ‘80s hardcore. The band passed on the typical encore process by not leaving the stage and just continuing to play, delivering their inspiring 1999 hit “Drive” to great appreciation and another crowd singalong. Then they capped the show with one of their most dynamic numbers, the title track to 2004’s A Crow Left of the Murder LP. The anthemic tune about flying a bit left of the flock took the energy level to one of the evening’s top peaks, demonstrating a well-crafted setlist from a band that knows how to take its fans on a ride.
It would have been been nice if the venue’s volume level could have been turned up just a little higher, but there was no doubt that the Santa Barbara Bowl was one of the best places to see Incubus or any other band for that matter.