The Empyrean – a review
This review is going to be a bit less conventional, a bit more honest, a bit more personal. As a long-term casual listener of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I discovered John’s solo work earlier in this decade, with “only” three officially released albums and some demos available at that point. Given that those were the good old days of 28.8 Kbps dial-up, I stumbled upon songs’ lyrics weeks before I actually had the albums in my hands. And some of them felt like stunning poetry. Later on, it turned out that such poetry fit perfectly with the harmony of the music. Either way, here I am after more than five years, here you are, so let’s give this 10-song Odyssey through an artist’s mind and soul a spin. And hold tight.
The first couple of listens to the The Empyrean were pretty much like travelling without moving – as if someone was replaying a movie or a theatre play with many special effects, sudden changes in the script, improvs, incredible highs and incredible lows on and on throughout the night; and suddenly I felt like I had a minor supporting role added to the script in messy handwritten footnotes. And, as if it was a kaleidoscope or a painting a wave would leave in the sand, experience was never the same. At some points, it was giving me goosebumps, at some points, my heart was beating faster; and then, it would calm down to a state where I would have to be really calm to make through the whispers. It ended just the way it started: abruptly, with a single loud drum beat, fading to ten seconds of total silence. And then it begun again. And, frankly, I could repeat it until my modest audio device’s motor blows out.
Delicate piano would suddenly be overlapped with heavy guitar riffs, to further become a colourful solo, to end up drowning into a sea of strings, with the voice varying from Mephisto-esque baritone on One More Of Me to almost angelic falsetto leads sung in front of a gospel choir on the Light park of Dark/Light. There were howls and screams too, but given the dramatic story the album appears to be telling, each one of them was necessary and each one of them was in a properly calculated spot and fine-tuned to cause just the right reaction from the listener. Or, at least this particular listener.
The Empyrean might be an ecletic, hurricane-like story, a dense avalanche of emotion packed into a little more than an hour; the highest point in heaven taken centuries and light years away from how Dante imagined it to be and in a completely different context. Close your eyes, sit comfortably and allow yourselves to be taken to a whole new different world. My advice would be not to skip any of the songs and to try to listen to The Empyrean in its entity, from (before the)beginning to (after) the end(ing). The feeling is completely different when you let them flow into one another and allow all the curves, bumps and vortexes take you for a ride. And, as the sticker on the Japanese version of the CD says…turn it up!
If you’re expecting the super lo-fi sounds from the first two albums and the internet album, the electronic vibes of To Record Only Water For Ten Days and A Sphere In The Heart Of Silence, alt rock stripped to its basics of DC EP, The Will To Death and Inside Of Emptiness, the acoustic tenderness of Curtains or the almost-mainstream perfection of Shadows Collide With People; you’d better stop right there. If you have refrained from listening to song previews or if you’d just heard Unreachable, you should stop right there, too. The best possible option would be not to predict, not to expect and just let it surprise you. The versatile back catalog of a musician as prolific and creative as John should make you realise this even before picking up this CD: he never repeats himself, each one of his albums is different and, even though The Empyrean has its own story, the others were telling stories in some way, too. This is a little bit of everything, but in a way it was never put together before.
Favourites? Central, Song To The Siren, God and After The Ending. But don’t let that influence your opinion.
Least favourite? No such a thing.
Disclaimer: Nothing I can say should matter to you, you should give it a listen yourself.
