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Music
Mixing edges with echoes
The Red Hot Chili Peppers sound like they always did - only a lot better - on their new double CD offering, Stadium Arcadium.
By JOSH KORR
Published May 25, 2006
In pop music, back story is usually just a marketing gimmick. Avril Lavigne "writes her own songs." 50 Cent got shot nine times. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah packages their own CDs! Whatever. Sometimes, though, back story matters. We'll never know how close Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante came to killing himself with heroin, for instance. But it's impossible to listen to Stadium Arcadium, the band's new double CD, without shivering when Frusciante breaks in with his ethereal harmonies or turns his tactile tube-amp licks into a monster freakout solo. Okay, it's more than a shiver: As Frusciante's woodpecker upstrokes trade off with Flea's froggy pogo bass, and Anthony Kiedis tosses off goofy raps like "Chitty chitty baby/when your nose is in the nitty gritty" on Tell Me Baby, you just have to marvel at their sheer joy and vitality. Bob your head, do your little shoulder dance - and be glad they're still around. It seems a little strange to talk this way about a band once known mostly for performing wearing nothing but tube socks (not on their feet) and wallowing in sophomoric fantasy like the eight-minute Sir Psycho Sexy. But the Peppers have taken the rebirth thing seriously, proving on the two albums since Frusciante's 1998 return (he quit in 1992) that they're more than a gimmicky funk-rock-rap party band. With Stadium Arcadium, they're comfortable enough to circle back to the beginning without losing the melody and sense of craft they picked up along the way. The early Peppers would have turned Readymade into a monotone pounder with a heavy riff bled out until it sounded like pure distortion. Here it becomes what Rage Against the Machine could have done if they had had an ounce of subtlety. Dani California is like Last Dance With Mary Jane if Tom Petty had a little soul and Frusciante's minimalist bent. Stadium Arcadium is full of such echoes. Kiedis' enunciation on Tell Me Baby - "I'll move you like a baritone/Jungle Brothers on the microphone" - recalls the Bangles' Walk Like an Egyptian and Avril Lavigne's Canadian inflections. The watery backing vocals and rippling guitar waves of Animal Bar evoke an '80s one-hit wonder, until the thrashing chorus yanks the song back into the present. Bangles to Petty to Rage to Hendrix to P-Funk: That's the breadth of the Chili Peppers' sound. No other band is as stylistically wide-ranging yet still coherent. Blood Sugar Sex Magik, their 1991 breakthrough, foreshadowed late-'90s rap-rock and the groove that underpins today's dance-rock - and the album's biggest hit was a ballad. Stadium Arcadium likewise goes from the galloping frenzy of Torture Me to Hump de Bump's funk horns to Slow Cheetah's calm finger-picking. With 28 songs, the Peppers end up echoing themselves a little too much. Kiedis reuses his four or five staple melodies a bit too often, and his random-rhyme lyrics - while no more embarrassing than, say, Beck's - work better in smaller doses. The band could have easily trimmed three tracks from each disc. Still, nearly every song has at least a chorus, a Flea workout, or a crazy solo that makes it worthwhile. And though fast-forward was made for double albums, not all bands were. It's nice when the ones that aspire to such music live long enough to make it. CD REVIEW Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium (Warner Bros.) Grade: A-
[Last modified May 24, 2006, 13:43:38]
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Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
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