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Rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers
Photo: Warner Music
Album of the week:
Before one or disrespect falls: A status like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, founded in Los Angeles in 1983 and still based there, you first have to achieve in rock'n'roll.
Or how many bands can you think of where you can't just name all four members without Google - and it's a pop event when the guitarist is changed.
The guitarist!
So let's make it clear: singer Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea, drummer Chad Smith and - now back for the second time - guitarist John Frusciante are the Rolling Stones of Generation X. Around the turn of the millennium, when the albums »Californication« and »By The Way« appeared, one even thought for a moment that they were not only one of the most commercially successful, but also one of the best rock bands ever.
Well, that's what you thought about U2 too.
But then Frusciante, undoubtedly one of the best guitarists of his generation, said goodbye.
Producer Rick Rubin, who had taken the band, briefly known among friends as the Chili Peppers, under his fluffy bushy beard since their breakthrough and hit album Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991), was sent on hiatus in a fit of midlife crisis.
2016's "The Getaway," produced by Danger Mouse, will go down in history as one of the dullest Peppers moments, along with the ill-fated "One Hot Minute" (1995).
Now both Rubin and Frusciante have returned for »Unlimited Love«.
Just in time for the zeitgeist of the noughties revival, which is dragging old rock bands like Muse, Green Day and The Strokes back onto the big festival stages.
In the first liberated summer after (maybe, hopefully) the corona pandemic.
What could possibly go wrong?
Smells like Californication again!
Oh well.
More like cali-snore-ication, if the slightly tired joke is allowed.
Unlike the Stones, who can still put a traditional blues album on the market if necessary, the Peppers, who are approaching retirement age (Kiedis and Flea are 59, Smith 60, Frusciante at 52 a young jumper), find it rather difficult to imagine an adequate old age work.
They come from a very post-modern rock spectrum concocted from early hip-hop, funk and punk and are hardly suitable for a dignified »American Recordings« coffeetable album in the to deliver ruby sense.
How should that sound?
After a strong bass and chaotic jazz funk like in "Aquatic Mouth Dance" perhaps, one of the few highlights of "Unlimited Love".
This one track alone makes it clear how much potential this band still has for the future if they - for example - would meet up with the Brainfeeder posse around Flying Lotus and Thundercat (they live in the neighborhood anyway), and Flea didn't would always put the thumbscrews on when he starts raving about jazz.
However, there are also 16 other songs on this album, which with a running time of around 70 minutes offers plenty of fan service, but is also a test of patience.
Greetings from »Stadium Arcadium«.
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Red Hot Chili Peppers
Unlimited love
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Media: Audio CD
Release date: 03/01/2022
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Media: Audio CD
Release date: 03/01/2022
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After nice standards like the first single "Black Summer", which also sets the blissful retro sound of the album at the beginning and is reminiscent of "Otherside" or other Peppers hits, the band generously switches to idle from time to time.
For example, in the brash jam of "Poster Child," a rock'n'roll homage that deals with its own fame and from Led Zeppelin to Billie Jean, Duran Duran and Steve Miller, the entire Hall of Fame in one of those typical staccato Kiedis spoiled Gaga raps: “You got the best of my loco/ I take the rest of your showboat” is the refrain.
Very, very fragrant surfer prose, dude!
But still more bearable - and fun - than when Kiedis tries his hand at being the brooding ballad singer contemplating his wrinkles in the mirror on "Not The One" or too many other foam-stopping mellow mid-tempo tracks.
It doesn't have to be like that, really.
On the other hand, the attempt to pay homage to the early Prince is nice, as is extremely tight and funky in »She's A Lover«, other things are brutalistic psychfolk/funk rock nonsense like »Bastards of Light« or the somewhat awkward rock-opera attempt to imitate The Who ( "These Are The Ways").
So it's tedious to filter out the nuggets from this often all too leisurely trickling slide of beach pebbles.
However, moments of pure happiness are offered by discovering the many vignettes, licks, riffs, pirouettes or grandiose protzsoli that comeback kid Frusciante throws in with his guitars.
In exchange, there's unlimited love for the Chili Peppers.
Maybe just leave out the Red Hot at this stage of your career.
(7.5)
Listened briefly:
Etna – »Push Life«
Trick by trick, trick by trick, Etna from Dresden have become one of the most interesting German bands at the moment, anyone who has ever seen the duo live knows that anyway.
In »Trick by Trick«, Inéz Schaefer and Demian Kappenstein show how they create a hyper-modern pop and dance sound from a cheeky Chemical Brothers reference, cloud rap on autotune and MIA-trained world beats that also works internationally.
The stylistic spectrum of the widely acclaimed debut album from 2020 is expanded without much regard for charts or favours, role models such as The Knife still remain overpowering, but the wealth of ideas unfortunately decreases as the album goes on.
But anyone who self-confidently calls a stormy, anything but Teutonic electro disco track "Autobahn"
(7.0)
Jon Spencer & The HITmakers - »Spencer Gets It Lit«
Jon Spencer, the last defender of the punk rock spirit of New York's Midtown and Lower East Side, is of course also a joker: »Send out the HIT signal!
It's the most uncompromising album I've ever made!«, says the 57-year-old about his new album - as if he had ever made any compromises with Blues Explosion, Boss Hog, Heavy Trash or Pussy Galore.
So the boogie goes electric again, the guitars fuzz, the beat goes freak - and Spencer's vocals about everything that annoys, corrupts and gentrifies about modern life, loaded with lots of leather jacket testosterone, "Yeahs" and "Uhs", is still the old, sexy, always-irritated, blue-eyed version of James Brown.
By the way, Janet Weiss from Sleater-Kinney is on the drums of the really mercilessly power-grooving HITmakers.
(8.0)
Chris Imler - »Operation Beauty«
What would Captain Kirk have said if he had met someone like Chris Imler during his travels on the Starship Enterprise?
Probably analogous to the song on Imler's third album that mentions William Shatner: "Spooky Action At A Distance," phaser ready!
In Berlin's sloppy post-punk underground, where he worked for Peaches, Die Türen and many other acts, the always deliberately polite, always neatly dressed dandy with the Menjou mustache has come across as a stylistic agent provocateur since his debut »Nervös« (2014). .
The drummer, who likes to play standing up live, permeates the metallic, meditatively rattling industrial trip-hop into eternity, despite all the power of the groove, something ambiguous and noir-fatalistic,
when he puzzles and whispers his way through psychedelic night owl lyrics like »Look« or »Emptyness Full Of Stars«.
You never really get it, it's quicksilvering and fascinating.
When you hear it, you think: Alan Vega, Kraftwerk, Tricky, Bauhaus, Yello – but when you look, you think Sparks.
Not bad credentials, but none of that really does justice to the retro-futuristic sound of this "Operation Beauty".
As stupid as that sounds, Chris Imler is an original.
(7.8)
Confidence Man - »Tilt«
It's not just the noughties that are pushing back into the pop zeitgeist, but also the 90s.
Confidence Man is an electro quartet from Australia, whose beat and laptop faction like to remain veiled in black on stage in the background while the front duo, singer Janet Planet and dancer Sugar Bones, vogue up front.
On their second album, after a still half-baked debut from 2018, they hit the party sound for a shameless nineties rave update - with killer grooves and a feminist message ("Angry Girl", "Toy Boy"): big beat and acid, straight Strictly Rhythm House, Pizzicato Five and lots of Ace of Base love ("Push It Up").
Pump up the jam again.
(7.5)