Red Hot Chili Peppers
Return of the Dream Canteen

At a certain point, everything in life seems like a consequence of a massive Stockholm syndrome. You're enveloped in it, and no matter how much you look at yourself from the outside, you can't help but love your tormentors. Those who keep you in chains. We're all a bit hostage to someone, in work, in family, in friendships. We are blackmailed by ourselves and the person we wanted to be, by the choices we made that continuously resonate in us.

And so is music, and many of you can confirm this. We are in the sweet clutches of those artists who captured our hearts as youngsters, and we wouldn't trade a new song from our adolescent favorites for the complete works of Mozart. Years go by, the whims of youth lose their momentum, the limbs grow weary, and we like to settle into the sugary illusions of the young man who still lives within us. We take refuge in the safe harbor, to suckle the milk of the mother who fed us. The sweetness of the nectar is such because it was the first, and from it, we began to realize the world around us, to define our tastes. Our identity.

But. But. The syndrome does not necessarily imply a lack of critical vision. We can indulge in the guiltiest pleasures with full awareness of how flawed, or mean, or disreputable they are. Anything to survive the produce-consume-die cycle. Take everything from me, but in return, I ask for a fetish, a simulacrum that revives the inner child. We move toward old age increasingly clinging to what little or much authenticity we have experienced, and even if over time it wears out and decays, the flame of memories, of youthful feelings, keeps that pleasure ever authentic (or almost), intimately ours.

Most baffling nonsense to say that this time I felt something different, something outside this syndrome. After perhaps twenty years in which the band's music resonated in me as an implicit reference to a primal moment of falling in love with that guitar, that graceless singing, those four brutes, wounded and drugged aboard a Pontiac in the desert (year 1999), after all these years I now feel I can completely separate the kidnapped child from the rational man, the attentive listener.

Returning to the table of dreams. A passage of those memorable, because perhaps one has to go back decades to find something of equal dignity and importance. It is the project of overcoming genre which in 2002 gave only partial results, and in 2006 was attenuated in an encyclopedic approach that harmonized all the different instances inherent in the band. Then a long hiatus, two alien albums, and finally the resurrection of Christ Frusciante. A warm-up album, and now finally the piece, a return to the most disorienting and enveloping dreams, the hybridization of identity for a further achievement. Bigger. After forty years, evolving is not taken for granted, and often it is done in the opposite direction. But not here, not this time. Everything settles, everything in its right place.

From the freely meandering guitar to the most tireless rhythms, the bass grooves, the exquisite vocal harmonies. The pop postulated in By the Way, but not fully realized, now sparkles thanks to a compositional maturity never before expressed at these levels. There's a filigree that touches on prog, the most subtle and gentle of Genesis (not so much in the structures, but in the layering).

Interlocking verses, composite choruses, variations, bridges, riffs and codas, overdubs, synth rhythms and electronic halos, acoustic guitars, and seismic lashes, hippie infatuations and street cynicism, funk jolts and classic rock gigantism, synthetic landscapes, and warm blues gusts. The songs on the album released in April were simpler and more straightforward, but then evidently jamming for months and months (pandemic) the four-headed monster finally spat out the gems it had been holding within for some time. There's evolution, at sixty there's still a desire to change.

A feast, a buffet, but with food and drink this time carefully selected, prepared with profound love and care, brushed with the talent and wisdom of those who after several attempts have learned to leave the less exquisite dishes off the table. Sum and surpassing of one's own "culinary" art, refined over 34 years (with perhaps providential breaks to regenerate the desire, the musical impulse that for them is, I would say, a sexual urge).

I'm done. Is this the delirium of the victim in its most unrestrained apotheosis?