Red Hot Chili Peppers 'I'm With You'

Red Hot Chili Peppers
I’m With You
(Warner)

From the solidarity of its title and a significant line-up change, to the eulogy for a lost friend and the fact that it’s the first album in half a decade, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 10th studio LP is all about surviving and moving forward. It may be solid and – no surprise – naggingly viral to the ear, but it’s also quite reflective and rambling, wistful and downbeat. Still, even constant experimentation and the presence of regular producer Rick Rubin can’t mask the subdued vibe or the absence of on-again off-again guitarist John Frusciante —  here replaced by touring member Josh Klinghoffer.

Five years after the eternal L.A. funk hijackers released the huge-selling double LP Stadium Arcadium, this follow-up feels like less a calendar-marking event (do those even exist anymore?) than a late-career consolidation from one of rock’s last name-brand acts. And it plays like an accepted settling into middle age — not that that’s a bad thing. It just means it’s missing most of the prankishness – and easy-breezy instant-singles – of the quartet’s past work. Not to mention the guitar fireworks.

Instead, I’m With You visits 14 songs over a full hour, tucking into world-weary ballads and Stones-y classic rock as often as breaking out repetitive funk signifiers and sudden atmospheric twists. Like Beastie Boys’ recent Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, it’s at once ultra-familiar and self-consciously weird. Unlike it, though, youthful verve has been displaced by maturity. It’s about stepping back and taking stock.

Written for L.A. punk club owner Brendan Mullen, who died on the day rehearsals for the album started, the standout ‘Brendan’s Death Song’ is as direct as its title. It’s a solemn eulogy complete with mention of reapers and boatmen, running its hard-won course from acoustic clarity to clashing rock that unmistakably doubles as a wake. Other thoughtful entries include the winding barroom ballad (and probable single) ‘Police Station’, the sweetly melancholic closer ‘Dance Dance Dance’, the country-finished slow burn ‘Meet Me at the Corner’ and the piano-centred ‘Happiness Loves Company’, about young bands hungering for stardom.

Matching that inward moodiness is a tendency towards layering well beyond the basic instruments, from ethereal harmonies to hand percussion to bedrock piano. Effects are up for grabs too, as proven at album's start by the dissonant guitar, over-driven rhythms and distorted vocals of opener ‘Monarchy of Roses’. Once given the working title ‘Disco Sabbath’, it oscillates between those two poles instead of reconciling them, but it’s still pleasantly burbling. And that tune, ‘Brendan’s Death Song’ and ‘Goodbye Hooray’ all benefit from Rubin’s bruised production crackle.

Lead single ‘The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie’, which at first seems more like the dumb fun of RHCP past, brings in enough George Harrison-esque slide guitar to counter initial thoughts. ‘Goodbye Hooray’ is both stop-start and straight-on, indulging in wild soloing and brief stabs at a cosmic vibe, while ‘Factory of Faith’ is somewhere between Cake and Modest Mouse (not just because of the talk-singing). The Afrobeat-slanted ‘Ethiopia’ actually sounds more like RHCP than any other song.

As ever, certain tracks are spoiled by Anthony Kiedis’ dubious rhymes and clunky asides. “It’s emotional / And I told you so,” he rhymes on the half-hearted party song ‘Look Around’, which features Beastie Boys cohort Money Mark on Hammond organ. On ‘Did I Let You Know’ he declares “I can’t resist the smell of your seduction,” references Beach Boys sound-alikes Jan & Dean and drops this dire couplet: “I like you cheeky / Oh so Mozambique-y.” And on the betrayal ode ‘Even You Brutus?’, he comes off like bad Stones while mirroring “sister Brutus” with “sister Judas.”

Still, for all their goofy flair, Kiedis’ lyrics have grown more wisely couched and sharply observational than most in modern rock, and the more poignant of these songs deal well in images and allusions. And of course, Kiedis as frontman is as crucial to Red Hot Chili Peppers as Flea and Chad Smith’s physics-defying rhythm section. If Kiedis is more grown-up these days, though, new-recruit guitarist Josh Klinghoffer often retreats back to funky stock licks that feel too much like brightly coloured placeholders. He doesn’t seem keen to innovate and surprise the way Frusciante was, and his overall work here is so disciplined that it’s utilitarian.

So it’s a quieter, restrained, more terrestrial Red Hot Chili Peppers that emerges on I’m With You. Coupled with the exit of Frusciante, that will be enough to disappoint many fans. But even with its flaws, this isn’t a bad album. The songs themselves are interesting and often robust, and middle age suits Kiedis surprisingly well. It’s the treatment of the songs that seem conflicted, as if unsure whether aging gracefully means rehashing classic rock or just toning down the limb-flailing of yore. Or how often to insert a wagging funk lick to remind us we’re listening to the same band.

Who are Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2011? It turns out even they’re not sure. But they’re figuring it out, if only the world still has the patience to bear with them.

Doug Wallen

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Red Hot Chili Peppers - 'The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie'