When Audiovent tour with Adema next month, they surely won’t hit the road under the banner the Sibling Rivalry Tour, but maybe they should.
Adema’s frontman, Marky Chavez, is of course the half-brother of Korn’s Jonathan Davis. Audiovent’s blood runs even thicker: singer Jason Boyd and guitarist Ben Einziger are the brothers of Incubus vocalist Brandon Boyd and guitarist Mike Einziger. And bassist Paul Fried is Ben and Mike’s stepbrother. Audiovent are capped off by drummer Jamin Wilcox, son of Jon Wilcox from Todd Rundgren’s Utopia.
However, the band, whose major-label debut, Dirty Sexy Nights in Paris, comes out June 4, isn’t Incubus Jr. Yeah, Jason’s voice sounds a lot like his bro’s on such cuts as “Looking Down” and “When the Rain,” but Jason said that’s where the similarities end.
“We’re influenced by different people, so that’s what separates us,” he explained from his home near Calabasas, California. “I’m more into the classic rock sound like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and David Bowie, and I think he’s more into Mike Patton and things like that.”
Dirty Sexy Nights in Paris is a melodic hard rock album filled with propulsive guitars, emotionally expressive vocals and galvanic rhythms. The first single, “Energy,” builds from a misty reverie to a full-throttle venting session, and is about Boyd’s first true love, with whom he parted ways during the album’s creation.
” ‘Energy’ and a lot of the record was written during the breakup,” he said. “And that song in particular is about my realization that I can’t be dependent on any one person except myself. It’s just a constant reminder of where I was at that point in my life and now the song just lets me know that I can’t get back there again.”
Another song, “Looking Down,” is a triumphant cut that blends echoey guitars and restrained vocals with more agitated tones, and features the chorus, “We’ll stand on top of the world looking down.”
“That one kind of has to do with the whole Incubus thing,” Boyd said. “It’s about how we are gonna set ourselves apart in time and we’re gonna make it. We’re gonna do what we set out to do from the very beginning. It’s kind of our inspiration song as a band.”
Naturally, Boyd likes to downplay the “whole Incubus thing.” He insisted Audiovent has never asked for nor received direct help from Incubus, and that when he met Ben Einziger in junior high at AE Wright Middle School, he had no idea Brandon was already jamming with Ben’s brother.
“It’s kind of like fate brought us together,” Jason said. “We started only a little bit after Incubus did. We’ve been together as a band for nine years and we all grew up together. We’re best friends.”
There’s a problem with joining a band with your close friends. As time passes and you tour extensively and deal with the various pressures of the music business, even the best of pals sometimes wind up hating one another. But for now that’s not something Audiovent are even remotely worried about.
“We’ve been through a lot together and right now things are finally starting to happen,” Boyd enthused. “It was such an amazing thing to be able to hear our record for the first time. It was like a dream come true.”
