Deconstruction
Deconstruction

While Perry Farrell and Stephen Perkins were cashing in with the first, disappointing album of Porno for Pyros, the other two survivors of the Jane's Addiction diaspora - guitarist Dave Navarro and bassist Eric Avery - set up a complex musical project called Deconstruction, along with drummer Mike Murphy. The idea of the two Los Angeles musicians was to expand the wave-lysergic insights of the masterpiece "Ritual de lo habitual" and channel them into an ambitious work, capable of reflecting the brightest facets of the Jane's Addiction diamond in a baroque delirium, a worthy heir of the most authentic Californian psychedelia.
Eric Avery was the principal architect of the group, also taking charge of the vocal parts. A tormented character, a brilliant architect of stunning bass lines that exalted the more intellectual aspect of Jane's music, Eric found amongst these grooves the opportunity, having finally freed himself from Perry Farrell's despotic yoke, to unleash his artistic soul, his junkie anxieties in vivid, uncompromising music. "Deconstruction" is indeed a Byzantine work, with many excessively long tracks but never tiresome: the conceptual heaviness of Pink Floyd and Joy Division is sublimated and melts on the waves off Big Sur.
Dave Navarro was the ideal companion for this adventure. The talent of the Hispanic-origin guitarist had not yet been crippled by an excess of egotism and tacky glamour as it is nowadays: in 1994, he was the best axe-man in the world, capable of transcribing his demons into textbook flames and divine flourishes, ignoring the sirens of the music biz (he had declined Axl Rose's personal offer to join GNR).  
In this work, Navarro performs marvels, expanding on Jane's tracks like "Obvious": designing fabulous oceanic horizons, full of a sound both opulent and essential at the same time, layering wave, psychedelia, and hard in one fell swoop, playing for the last time in his career like a god.

"L.A. Song" opens the album in grand style. Clear arpeggios of Navarro accompany Avery's emotive talk-over, which then evolve into a furious funky vortex, until Dave's Ibanez majestically soars over the Pacific Ocean, as if surfing against a backdrop of a crystal-clear sky.
The heart of the album lies in long compositions like "Singles", "One", "Wait for history" and "Fire in the hole", played on the intertwining of Avery's hookian bass and Navarro's insights, now rarefied now hallucinogenic. Especially the apocalyptic blues of "Fire in the hole" is a classic: with Farrell's voice and Dave Jerden's polished production, it would have been a potential hit akin to "Mountain song". The moments of greater fervor reminiscent of the past can be found in "Hope", "America" and "Dirge", where stylistic alloys of hard and funk origin soon transfigure towards dreamlike shores. The urgency of Jane's Addiction is a memory, especially in Avery's singing, certainly not as expressive as Farrell's: but inspiration, beauty, and imagination in these grooves are certainly not inferior, and they constitute the inevitable outcome of that experience. Exceptional in this sense is the complex "Big sur", a "Three days" stripped of Farrell's freak-decadent spiritualism, but equally spectacular in presenting ethereal guitar solutions, while Navarro takes the mic with the cry of "Gone are the dusty gods of duck and cover drills/  gone are the dusty gods of echo cathedrals".
There are also moments of attention toward new sounds, for example the almost hip-hop/industrial flavors of the claustrophobic "Get at ‘em", while the instrumental "Iris" offers 5 minutes  of absolute ecstasy, with unexpected shoegaze echoes à la My Bloody Valentine embellishing Navarro's arrangements. Heartbreaking is finally the ballad "Son", an eerie and cold chemical confession by Eric: though composed in his cottage in Big Sur, it resonates with sinister Nordic Zeppelin-like echoes, at a sidereal distance from the mother band's sunniness.

Ultimately, a great record, the best legacy of the unrepeatable Jane's Addiction era. Unfortunately isolated, as Navarro eventually gave in to the temptation of the Peppers to replace John Frusciante and Avery began an artistic wandering that continues to this day. Nothing would remain the same as before: and this album is the perfect snapshot of an era coming to an end.