The Empyrean gets its first 10/10 from Terapija.net!
Many thanks to wonderful Tihana for the heads-up on this precious review. Croatian music e-zine, Terapija.net or, to be precise, their staff member with the nick Vidman, gave The Empyrean a clear 10 out of 10, accompanied by a very detailed review. If you live in the ex-YU world, you can read the actual review at this link; and if you don’t, I have translated it.
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To call John Frusciante a 1/4 of the Peppers is not OK. Seeing his input in the band, giving him only the name of the fourth band member would be almost offensive. His playing, regardless of its being three chords in a row, simplistic games with the strings or funky strumming, is a more than recognisable trademark; without which the Peppers wouldn’t be able to sound the way they do and be what they are.
Nowadays, he’s undoubtably one of the greatest guitarists in the world. The energy he puts into his playing is surpassing the limits of plain accords and scales. It is very hard to define his exact approach to guitar playing. Perhaps that is exactly what makes him so original, brilliant and commited.
Long before he’d joined the band he’s in today, during his teenage years, he was playing guitar 10 hours a day and he started recording his own material from the age 16 on, creating his own style and seeking motivation in the records of one of his biggest guitar idols, Hendrix.
Frusciante turned out to be a very complex and strange personality, he wanted to be noticed; but at the same time he was disturbed by fame, he started losing pace with the band, but also with his life. He tried to solve such issues by consuming heroin and cocaine. Somewhere in this timeframe, he published Niandra LaDes And Usually Just A T-Shirt, a double album, very painful and raw, the opinions on which varied, both amongst the critics and the audience. It was followed by equally dark Smile From The Streets You Hold, which was yet again landful of cruel songs which were depicting Frusciante’s condition: an endless and at that point dangerously serious battle with addiction, a battle that seemed to be nearing a fatal ending.
However, a completely different scenario took place and that affected everything he’d be doing in life and as a musician – he goes to rehab, finishes it with success and changes his life completely.
He returned to RHCP and soon published acclaimed and praised To Record Only Water For Ten Days and three years later, with help of his friend Josh Klinghoffer, he decides on quite a step: to publish six solo albums within a year – all different in terms of style, yet all of them defining them not only as a great guitarist, but also as an impressive songwriter, a visionary and an excellent musician overall, full of fantastic ideas and not afraid of experimenting with them.
After one more album, Curtains in 2005 and a lot of collaborations that included Ataxia, The Mars Volta and such, he takes a break from his solo work, until 2008 when he announces that he’s been working on a project called The Empyrean for quite a while.
We’re taking the stairs to the top, to the very Empyrean itself, to Frusciante’s long-expected album that took over two years to finish and which should be considered his overall masterpiece.
As always, that assumption is not wrong. The Empyrean is not only Frusciante’s finest material to date, but also a great achievement in comparison to what other musicians of our times have done.
This is the highest point of his opus as of now, he’s using everything he’s learnt playing with elements of electronica (A Sphere In The Heart Of SilenceCurtains), drum machines and beats (To Record Only Water For Ten Days), followed by indie/new age riffs (The Will To Death) – all of that has been merged to one conceptual body of work here; in a way where those elements aren’t abolishing each other, where none of them is more prominent than the others, but in a way where they’re all mixed in a pretentious and functional, balanced harmony.
Unlike the other albums, which were known for their fantastically thought multi-layered, yet minimalistic approach; this is different in many ways. Almost all songs have orchestral parts, all of them have been combined from multiple sections. There was probably risk of making it all sound scattered and cluttered, yet Frusciante managed to make it sound like anything other than that.
The opening instrumental Before The Beginning starts with gentle guitar tones, simplistic drum beats, then a distorted guitar enters in a Steve Vai fashion; and from that point on, the song is slowly floating through Frusciante’s unique guitarist universe. To some a surprising choice for a cover, Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren is getting a more than deserved spot here, because the previous song simply melts into it and continues its sailing through an equally similar soft and relaxing space.
Perhaps Frusciante’s fantastic vocal abilities are most audible in that song – we’re talking about the variations between deeper and higher tones, the way he controls those transitions…it’s all showing how much his voice is improving from album to album and how much it’s gained in quality and originality.
One More Of Me is another song that deserves a very special mention regarding how John absolutely has no fear to take his voice where he’d never taken it before – and in this case he’s taking it to the deepest octave he can sing in.
Each of the remaining 7 songs (not counting the Japanese edition bonus songs, Today and Ah Yom) tell a different story of its own, metaphorically and literally, because it was already said that the album is a story of a man who is finding himself through understanding his own spirituality after a major downfall in life. John explained that in his own way on his blog.
And really, when you’re reading songs’ lyrics, the album is gaining even more points for its deep meaning and, most of all, the message it carries and the sense behind it. Just like a man who’s thinking about his own self, the songs talking about a specific, yet an universal being are changing from pleasant to sad, from melancoly to happiness, from pitch black to hope. Dark/Light is a great illustration of this concept: its first half is haunting and has a somewhat spooky feeling to it, and then it suddenly turns into a noble melody full of positive energy – just like its name predicts it to be.
Each song is like that, some less and some more, but in each one of them one can feel the change of the overall atmosphere, large progress through rhythm, vocals and lyrics.
Definitely, one of the best things about this album are the orchestral parts and blending the guitar into the entity formed by other instruments, instead of letting it rule.
Piano (Heaven, Central, Song To The Siren, strings (One More Of Me, After The Ending), more guitar solos (especially on Enough Of Me and Central – where Johnny Marr is featured), synths, acoustic guitars, drum machines, organ, remarkable backing vocals. All of that and much more is just a little part of what makes this collage called The Empyrean so strong and so complex. The name of the album itself means highest point in heaven and it’s obvious that it wasn’t picked as its name just like that, as it perfectly depicts the whole concept of the album, both lyrically and musically.
The Empyrean is the most beautiful surprise in the world of music at the start of 2009. and there’s no doubt it will be near the very top in the retrospectives done at the end of the year.
If there was anyone who doubted the creativity of this fascinating man and one of the most hard-working people in modern music; they should realise that he’s measuring up perfectly against the greatest with this album. This album won’t leave anyone feeling blank.
P.S. The album cover at first glance may look like just another avant-garde painting you can see at almost every corner nowadays; but when you take a better look, you’ll see that it’s full of details telling stories of the songs themselves as well as the album’s title.
Rating: 10/10
Reviewed by Vidman on 23rd January 2009
