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Red Hot Chili Peppers Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Unlimited Love’.

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Unlimited Love But Limited Appeal

Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Unlimited Love’.

Red Hot Chili Peppers are back. However, given that, despite a still undiminished position in the higher echelons of the musical hero worship that has endured since the early-’90s when songs such as ‘Give it Away’ and ‘Under the Bridge’ from 1991’s ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’ brought them to full-scale mainstream attention, much of the 21st Century has found them releasing largely forgettable albums that have simply repeated a tried and tested formula and not a lot more, it was going to take a lot to inspire any excitement for this return with their twelfth album and first since 2016’s spectacularly underwhelming ‘The Getaway’, ‘Unlimited Love’. But, hoping to recapture the little something special that has been lacking from their last few releases, ‘Unlimited Love’ finds the band reunited with original guitarist John Frusciante for the first time since 2006’s ‘Stadium Arcadium’ and producer Rick Rubin for the first time since 2011’s ‘I’m With You’.

‘Unlimited Love’ is an album which puts its trump card to the fore by launching with lead single and catchiest moment, ‘Black Summer’, on which Frusciante makes his return known with some excellent harmonic-filled, Jimi Hendrix style guitar work and the now 59 year old pirate look sporting Kiedis’ voice is stronger than it has ever been previously as he sings lyrics about sailors and platypus which are highly unlikely to make sense to anybody other than himself.

On the subject of Kiedis’ lyrics, he has never been the strongest wordsmith in popular music, but on much of ‘Unlimited Love’, his musings are positively cringeworthy, threatening to derail even the otherwise strongest of cuts musically. Cases in point are the Funky jam ‘Here Ever After’, which finds him still singing about “dangerous girls” and somewhat clichéd and cheesy subject matter in his late-’50s and ‘Whatchu Thinkin’’, on which the Native American themes are at best passé and at worst, downright exploitative. Props should be given though to sheer strength of musicianship on ‘Unlimited Love’, which, over the course of both ‘Here Ever After’ and ‘Whatchu Thinkin’’ and various other tracks has a habit of being able to turn something God-damn dreadful into something reasonably great, if still a little Chili Peppers by numbers. We feel the old adage ‘you can polish a turd, but it is still a turd’ may be appropriate at this juncture.

Kiedis should always be dissuaded against writing in the third person, as proved by both ‘It’s Only Natural’, which is only saved from complete mundanity by Frusciante’s guitar solo, and more so by ‘Veronica’, on which, despite the fact that it has been a long time since he has walked amongst them, he rather patronisingly attempts to provide a glimpse into the lives of

working class people. At least that latter song is vaguely memorable (albeit for the wrong reasons) though, because ‘She’s the Lover’ and ‘One Way Traffic’ barely manage to leave any sort of impression at all. With the album featuring a mammoth sixteen tracks in an hour and thirteen-minutes that seems to last an entire week, these two fillers should have been prime candidates for being left on the cutting room floor.

Stronger moments on ‘Unlimited Love’ include ‘Aquatic Mouthpiece’, a Flea-driven, groove and Rap-based, horn-heavy monster with one of the silliest titles you will have heard since the last silly Chili Peppers title, which offers a meditation on the power of music; the similarly-themed ‘Poster Child’, which seems to owe a lot musically, in equal parts, to both Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ (‘Storm Front’, 1989) and the Chili Peppers’ own ‘Walkabout’ (‘One Hot Minute’, 1995) and the KISS-esque ‘The Great Apes’, on which Rubin provides a stellar production with infeasibly clean guitars and Frusciante provides the album’s finest solo. Kiedis’ lyrics may be at their most hilariously bad in a Spinal Tap sort of way here, but he does manage to evoke something Rock and Rollickingly sexual and menacing with lines such as “Pixelated panther, I’ll let it purr.”

Meanwhile, the placing of the undeniably effective Psych-Rock, tom-tom bashing epic ‘The Heavy Wing’ and the affecting, acoustic ditty ‘Tangelo’ at least enables ‘Unlimited Love’ to be put back on the shelf with some amount of dignity after an often torturous listen that we do not wish to repeat any time soon ... or at least not until we feel obliged to review the next Red Hot Chili Peppers album in the hope that, unlike this album, the quality lives up to the excitement surrounding it.

‘Unlimited Love’ is out now on Warner Records.

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