Red Hot Chili Peppers
Stadium Arcadium

THE REVIEW

Double whammy for the dear old peppers. The Los Angelenos go all out for their ninth studio album: 28 tracks, and all very different from each other. The double album trend seems to have made a comeback: in the last two-three years, Foo Fighters ("In Your Honor"), System of A Down ("Mezmerize"/"Hypnotize"), Ben Harper ("Both Sides of the Gun"), and the revived Eagles ("Long Road Out of Eden") have taken this approach. It even seems that originally, Frusciante & co. had defined forty tracks on three CDs to be released throughout the entire 2006!.. Intense! Rightly so, Warner said "Halt!".

Assuming that every double album is by definition a musical exaggeration (even the Beatles' "White Album" wasn't spared from this), "Stadium Arcadium" is no exception: very successful episodes and sure grabs alternate with tracks that leave you baffled. However, this is not intended to be a track-by-track review, let alone of both discs: between the skip and forward buttons on my stereo's remote, a sort of natural selection of the tracks on this CD emerged, ultimately legitimized by my CD burner. The result of this survival of the fittest in the tracklist is nonetheless the beauty of 18 tracks, in order:

Stadium Arcadium (nice, Bartok's edit)

1. Dani California
2. Tell Me Baby
3. Charlie
4. Stadium Arcadium
5. Hump de Bump
6. She's only 18
7. Slow Cheetah
8. Torture Me
9. Hard to Concentrate
10. Especially in Michigan
11. Warlocks
12. We Believe
13. 21st Century
14. Hey
15. She looks to Me
16. So much I
17. C'mon Girl
18. Death of a Martian

I would like to point out that an album with 18 good tracks is a rarity these days, so after criticizing the release choice, I immediately break a lance in favor of the peppers. Another thing to highlight is the stylistic variety of the tracks and arrangements; surely, a good job was done in this regard.

The track that starts the album, "Dani California," at times recalls "Parklife" by Blur. The peculiarity of this single is the pathetic parody music video of rock legends: an unoriginal idea but surely successful with the MTV generation. It's okay to mimic Beatles, Kiss, Misfits, Van Halen, and the like but... hey!... hands off Kurt's good soul! A little respect!.. The song isn't bad, a good forerunner.

"Tell me Baby" marks a pleasant return to the funky sounds of the good old days. I would have chosen this as the first single, but that's okay. The pleasant surprise of this album is that there are various extremely cute funky tracks ("Charlie", "Hump de Bump", "21st Century", "C'mon Girl") and considering the sounds of the previous "By the Way," it's not a small thing. There are ballads, but there is an attempt to avoid banality: "Hard to Concentrate" picks up semi-Caribbean sounds (Frusciante's guitar, never so versatile as on this album, at some point sounds like a ukulele) and "Hey" is a Latin slow rock complete with a Santana-style solo.

However, the best tracks on "Stadium Arcadium" are undoubtedly "She's only 18", a seventies funk rock that stands out as one of the finest peppers' tracks since "Around the World", and then "Especially in Michigan". This piece immediately pushes, starting with a riff that seems like U2, only to discover in the end that it also features the guitar of the great Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, directly from The Mars Volta, not kidding! "We Believe" is its ideal continuation; gentle and melancholic verses are interposed with a resolute chorus, built on simple yet evocative chords. The Mars Volta also seem almost honored in the syncopated rhythms of "Torture Me", another upbeat track.

To conclude this selection (as well as the entire album) is a ballad, "Death of a Martian", heartfelt and poignant enough to close this long musical adventure.

A few lines on the excluded tracks, considering that two singles have already come out of them: "Snow (hey oh!)" sounds like a new "Universally Speaking", that is, the classic deliberately repetitive piece good for radio, but personally, after two listens, it already bored me. Then when I also heard "Desecration Smile" in heavy rotation, I thought either I didn't understand anything about music marketing or the Warner executives had gotten stupid. For the rest, boring pieces, b-sides good for padding.

It's a shame they wanted to go overboard; it could have been a really good CD. My judgment is thus split in two: 4 stars for the selection as I would have made it and 3 for the album as conceived.