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Part of a review of their latest album, is Kristy moonlighting? 
The music? The music is an ugly Frankenstein’s monster constructed from all the least likeable, least groovy bits of rock, funk, psychedelia and hip hop, with an added patina of plain stupidity. Singer Anthony Kiedis radiates the kind of braggadocious bro vibes that, aurally speaking, make me want to cross the road for my own safety. Kiedis writes terrible lyrics, flatlining melodies and has a horrible shouty voice. It goes without saying that he possesses the kind of swaggering confidence inversely proportional to all these impediments. Do the sums and you could reasonably claim that Red Hot Chili Peppers have waged a 40-year campaign of brute bone-headed idiocy upon the world and yet somehow emerged triumphant.
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Produced by long-term enabler Rick Rubin, this is the band’s first album since 2016, and their first with guitarist John Frusciante for almost 20 years.
Per the title, Red Hot Chili Peppers are blessing us with 17 new songs – almost 75 minutes of music. This is, by some degree, too much love. The worst and sadly most prevalent kind of Red Hot Chili Peppers song is a doggedly unmelodic, squelchy faux-funk thing garnished with a half-rapped torrent of vaguely unseemly doggerel. There are several examples of this form on Unlimited Love – ‘She’s a Lover’; ‘Whatchu Thinkin’; ‘One Way Traffic’; ‘Let ’Em Cry’ – but we shall let ‘Poster Child’ speak for all of them. Imagine Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ if Joel had been more interested in the Thompson Twins and Caddyshack than Belgians in the Congo. It’s very bad indeed.
Other diversions are simply bizarre. On the plodding, phased folk-rock pastiche ‘Black Summer’, Kiedis’s absurd vocal appears to be a misguided tribute to a West Country pirate. It’s a song with an acute identity crisis: it thinks it is ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which is bad enough, when it is actually Spinal Tap fronted by Edward Teach.
Mercifully, Red Hot Chili Peppers have a secret weapon. Bass player Flea is a world-class musician who over the years has negotiated a series of day-release deals in order to play with grown-ups such as Thom Yorke. His contributions dominate the best songs here. The slippery groove of ‘It’s Only Natural’ is genuinely terrific. The pretty ‘The Great Apes’ reminds me of early REM, off-time and slightly odd. ‘Aquatic Mouth Dance’ is a rhythmically interesting blend of lounge funk and blaring soul, marred only by Kiedis’s contribution, which can be likened to a toddler scrawling on the walls.
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Produced by long-term enabler Rick Rubin, this is the band’s first album since 2016, and their first with guitarist John Frusciante for almost 20 years.
Per the title, Red Hot Chili Peppers are blessing us with 17 new songs – almost 75 minutes of music. This is, by some degree, too much love. The worst and sadly most prevalent kind of Red Hot Chili Peppers song is a doggedly unmelodic, squelchy faux-funk thing garnished with a half-rapped torrent of vaguely unseemly doggerel. There are several examples of this form on Unlimited Love – ‘She’s a Lover’; ‘Whatchu Thinkin’; ‘One Way Traffic’; ‘Let ’Em Cry’ – but we shall let ‘Poster Child’ speak for all of them. Imagine Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ if Joel had been more interested in the Thompson Twins and Caddyshack than Belgians in the Congo. It’s very bad indeed.
Other diversions are simply bizarre. On the plodding, phased folk-rock pastiche ‘Black Summer’, Kiedis’s absurd vocal appears to be a misguided tribute to a West Country pirate. It’s a song with an acute identity crisis: it thinks it is ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which is bad enough, when it is actually Spinal Tap fronted by Edward Teach.
Mercifully, Red Hot Chili Peppers have a secret weapon. Bass player Flea is a world-class musician who over the years has negotiated a series of day-release deals in order to play with grown-ups such as Thom Yorke. His contributions dominate the best songs here. The slippery groove of ‘It’s Only Natural’ is genuinely terrific. The pretty ‘The Great Apes’ reminds me of early REM, off-time and slightly odd. ‘Aquatic Mouth Dance’ is a rhythmically interesting blend of lounge funk and blaring soul, marred only by Kiedis’s contribution, which can be likened to a toddler scrawling on the walls.
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