Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
Jupiter :1. Dani California
2. Snow (Hey Oh)
3. Charlie
4. Stadium Arcadium
5. Hump de Bump
6. She's Only 18
7. Slow Cheetah
8. Torture Me
9. Strip My Mind
10. Especially in Michigan
11. Warlocks
12. C'mon Girl
13. Wet Sand
14. Hey.
Mars :
1. Desecration Smile
2. Tell Me Baby
3. Hard to Concentrate
4. 21st Century
5. She Looks to Me
6. Readymade
7. If
8. Make You Feel Better
9. Animal Bar
10. So Much I
11. Storm in a Teacup
12. We Believe
13. Turn It Again
14. Death of a Martian.
At the beginning of the second hour of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' mammoth new double album, the guy who once yelped, "I want to party on your pussy!" Chuchotent-sings a gentle, but not unrelated, proposition: "All I want is for you to be happy / And take this woman and make you my family." The delicate "Hard to Concentrate" is the most vulnerable Peppers tune ever - a full-on marriage proposal from Anthony Kiedis, Flea on bass and John Frusciante muted layers of guitars slow dances Afrobeat hand drums.
The twenty-eight songs, the box-Stadium Arcadium length is not an average age concept album on trade in your tube sock for a tux. But the band's ninth studio album is the most ambitious work of its twenty-three-year career - an attempt to consolidate everything that is Chili Peppers, from their earlier, funny funk-metal stuff to nu-soul "Under the Bridge "- Balladry to Californicating pop-style vocal harmony. And unlike the Foo Fighters' but equally expansive bloated double disc In Your Honor, and almost every other double album of the post-vinyl, the band pulls it off. It is an end-of-career triumph that could pass for another, the largest group of lesser-hits collection.
Much of the credit for the album depth - and the swelling, ever-morphing, helmet-candy arrangements that stimulate all tracks - goes to the band not so secret weapon, John Frusciante. It has been clear since his return to the band in 1999 Californication Frusciante who came away from his near-fatal heroin addiction with new musical superpowers, and they are in full bloom on Stadium Arcadium. Take "Charlie", which sounds like a monochromatic "Give It Away" retread until it erupts in rainbows of Frusciante's duel and falsetto harmonies, guitar solos simultaneously. Also of note are the laser gun funk riffing and nuclear fuzz solo on the pulsing, supercatchy "Tell Me Baby" and Art Garfunkel-like backup vocals on the claim, droning ballad "If".
But, as the Rolling Stones - another rhythm-conscious who have begun to act by ripping the black music only to dig much deeper - the Red Hot Chili Peppers are a real group, where everyone counts and nobody That is replaceable (except, perhaps, Bill Wyman). Flea has spent years reducing its frantic popping and slapping a Zen-like melodic minimalism, while merger ever more deeply with Chad Smith, who remains the swingingest rock drummer this side of Mitch Mitchell. But after 2002's By the Way, the group is the least funky album, bassist finally cuts loose again here, reasserting himself as the best non-hip-hop reason to buy a subwoofer. Flea's quacking, double-time lines on "21st Century" are a reminder that the Chili Peppers were recording Gang of Four-influenced dance rock when Franz Ferdinand was just a dead Austrian. And then there's Kiedis, whose voice still improving at an age when many rockers start slipping their high notes to the choir. It shows throughout the versatility of his death-on impression of Jimi Hendrix (his greatest influence voice) on "Hump de Bump" in a new country-rock growl on the refrain of the riff-o-rama track " Readymade. " Kiedis is also, more or less, the inventor of rap rock, and he embraces his roots, from the most rhymes on any album since BloodSugarSexMagik. He has not updated its flow in a couple of decades, and most of its texts are still unrepentant nonsense ( "Ticky ticky tackita tic tac toe / I know that everybody Eskimo"). Very But good knowledge of the style makes it an appeal counterpoint to the band's last day melodic splendor, instead of a Durst-ian embarrassment.
Stadium Arcadium midtempo has too many pieces, and, in the manner of U2's All That You Can not Leave Behind, is more of a sum of the Peppers' career as a step forward. But the group is still capable of surprises, as on one of the disks, "many potential singles: the bouncy, four-chord" Make You Feel Better, "a sixty-influenced pop tune with Fifth Dimension harmonies and Ringo Starr beat. few songs later, Kiedis seems to confess some fears about the project at hand: "The risk, is it worth it? / The disc, is it perfect? "Perfect? Nah. But close enough.
Rolling Stone
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