RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - JOHN FRUSCIANTE - Stadium Arcadium

Is it the latest Jane’s Addiction, or the new incarnation of Red Hot Chili Peppers, that we're hearing on “Dani California”? The Californian band's new single is a hulking, plasticky slab of hard rock, in the style of the aforementioned Jane’s Addiction, Velvet Revolver, and surely the forthcoming Guns ‘n’ Roses (and as if that weren't enough, the lifted melody from Tom Petty's “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” is grounds for an immediate lawsuit). A hefty structure, chunky guitars, and a nicely melodic chorus: three of the most clichéd ingredients going. It hardly matters, then, that “Dani California” closes the conceptual circle begun with “Californication” and continued with “By The Way”, of which the new track is, in a sense, a natural continuation.

Fortunately, the youthful itches run their course with the new single, finally making room for the new dynamics of a band that has tried, with partial success, to reinvent itself by finding that team chemistry that had somewhat gotten lost along the way. Aware of this rediscovery, the Red Hot Chili Peppers certainly didn't hold back, throwing onto the market everything they managed to record. The result is the band's first double album in its history – truth be told, "BloodSugarSexMagik" was also conceived as a double album, but there the label's niet won out.

The two hours of music packed into "Stadium Arcadium" are a lot, too much. John Frusciante's hand is evident here, to the point that one could, not unreasonably, consider the record a direct offspring of that "Shadows Collide Wih People" released a full 4 years ago now. Not just Frusciante, though. Flea and Chad Smith hadn't been so prominent since "Californication", and when the pre-release rumours spoke of hard rock tracks, we, eternal skeptics, hadn't believed it. We were wrong, but it's easy to say so now.

The first disc (titled "Jupiter"), opened by "Dani California", offers some of the band's best compositions in years. Alongside the dull "Snow Hey Oh" and "Charlie", "Stadium Arcadium" stands out, a big acoustic ballad in line with the tradition of "My Friends" and "Otherside". The same goes for "Strip My Mind", though here we're closer to the more recent "Don't Forget Me", and "Slow Cheatin'", a little pop gem with an unforgettable melody, an easy chorus, relaxed and happy atmospheres. Either we've fallen in love, or the Chili Peppers' melodies have shed their sugary, saccharine clothes and gained more bite and incisiveness.

Next up we find the playful funk-pop of "Hump de Rump" and that "She's Only 18", which dusts off the American hard rock-blues tradition (Jimi Hendrix above all), sweetened with the usual cloying dose of pop (here really too sugary, considering the context too), Anthony Kiedis's preferred mode. Special mention also goes to "Warlocks", a funk opener with Kiedis torn between rap and pop, and "Wet Sand", branded with Frusciante's blood, so much is it genetically his offspring.

The best shots were fired right away, and there's very little left in the Californians' magazine, and what little remains are blunted bullets. Painless and ordinary, the 14 tracks of the second disc (titled "Mars") follow one another rapidly, leaving a bland aftertaste. And to think that "Desecration Smile", placed there to open the dance, didn't bode badly: a country march enriched with California's flowers and colors, an insistent rhythm and a simple melody. In the following half hour, though, very little happens: the jolts come when we hear, in their final versions, the tracks "Ready Made" and "21st Century", which had been performed live last year. The first impressions we'd had were unfortunately the right ones: "Ready Made" is a hard rock potboiler, an eighties riff-fest with an FM-radio chorus (the sharpest-eared won't miss what's almost a pseudo-plagiarism of the defunct Creed). "21st Century" is a Frusciante divertissement, stuffing a pop melody with effects and chords over which Anthony Kiedis coos a lullaby. Then "Storm In A Teacup" arrives, and suddenly we're plunged back into that drugged, abandoned world that was "One Hot Minute": same sounds, same atmospheres, same situations. Will Frusciante go back to playing "One Hot Minute" songs live? We doubt it. Really little else to say about this second half of "Stadium Arcadium", which drifts along drowsily to its conclusion, without stirring any further awakenings.

In conclusion, "Stadium Arcadium" represents, on the whole, the attempted comeback of a band that was written off and declared dead, even by us. The gamble only half pays off, but credit must go to these forty-somethings for reaching their ninth studio album still with the urge to tell something (it doesn't matter what) to someone (it doesn't matter who).

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06/06/2006