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John Frusciante: A Chili Pepper’s Abundant Crop

Let’s say you’re a hotshot alt-rock guitarist whose mega-huge band hasn’t released a studio album in nearly three years. Let’s further presume that you have a suitcase full of tunes, a quavering voice that bears an eerie resemblance to Cat Stevens’s and work habits that a psychiatric professional might prescribe medication for.

Chances are you’re John Frusciante. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist has lately cranked out records with the kind of manic abandon that most folks reserve for their nervous tics. Over the last half-year alone, the guy has generated enough material to fill up a good chunk of an iPod Mini, releasing six CDs in little more than six months. And if the quality of Frusciante’s material is, shall we say, variable, well, that’s what happens when you opt to release every scrap of music you commit to tape.

“Curtains,” the most recent of the CDs, is also the best, a somber collection of jangling, folk-inflected ditties that, like most of the other discs, feels thoughtfully tossed off. The album is a candlelit living room affair, replete with sensitive-guy melodies (“The Past Recedes,” “Time Tonight”) and homespun chord progressions (“Anne,” “The Real”) that belie Frusciante’s reputation as the guy who, when he joined the Peppers in 1988, reinvigorated the band with a welcome jolt of virtuosity.

But that side of Frusciante’s musical personality is well represented on the discs, too.

“The Will to Death” opens with “A Doubt,” a languid, bittersweet rocker anchored by a recurring riff that showcases his scale-running proficiency. Frusciante calls the album — which he recorded and mixed in just five days — a “celebration of flaws,” but rough-hewed production aside, it’s tough to spot any of them. Instead, memorable tracks such as “Time Runs Out” and “An Exercise” are laced with sophisticated diminished chords and tricky time-signature changes. Even the forgettable ones here sound like they’d do just fine on the math section of the SAT.

During his bout with binge recording, Frusciante has been abetted by a number of talented enablers. Fugazi kingpin Ian MacKaye produced the excellent four-song “DC EP,” for instance, while Joe Lally, another Fugazi-er, plays bass on “Automatic Writing,” the strangest of Frusciante’s recent releases.

Credited to the band Ataxia, the album’s five longish songs find Frusciante, Lally and drummer Josh Klinghoffer layering treated guitars and electronics over repetitive dub bass lines. The effect is hypnotic — it’s best to keep this one out of the car stereo — and also deeply indebted to Public Image Ltd., whose early work provides the disc’s sometimes too-obvious template.

A collaboration between Frusciante and Klinghoffer, “A Sphere in the Heart of Silence” works the same sonic angle, but without Lally on groove patrol (and with Frusciante dialing down the mayhem), this album, like its title, is a bit portentous. Like a decommissioned Philip Glass symphony, the disc opener “Sphere” keeps building the drama but ultimately ends up going nowhere. And the vaguely cloying “Communique” suggests that someone’s been spending a little too much time with Brian Eno’s ambient albums.

Studded with catchy, punched-up rock tunes, however, “Inside of Emptiness” connects the dots between Frusciante’s Chili Peppers day job and his less direct moonlighting gig. Indeed, but for that pensive, Stevens-esque warble, “The World’s Edge” could easily be a “Mother’s Milk” outtake. And while any song purportedly inspired by Goth-meister Aleister Crowley is suspect automatically, “666” does live down to its beastly title, with the verse section’s chunka- chunka chord changes fused to a scream-along chorus that Anthony Kiedis should borrow for the next Peppers album.

On their own, of course, none of Frusciante’s recent discs is perfect. And it’s tempting to conclude that the guy should have just cherry-picked the obvious keepers and kept the rest on his hard drive.

But where would the fun be in that? When you release this much this fast, after all, you’re looking to make a point about the whole. Taken together, Frusciante’s recent output points to a seriously ambitious talent, one who has been mistaken for a mere guitar whiz for far too long.

—Shannon Zimmerman

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