Popboks.com review of The Empyrean
While a whole archive of The Empyrean reviews is being built, translated and laid out, I couldn’t resist showing you this one! What a pleasant surprise: a fellow Serbian website, Popboks, has reviewed The Empyrean. If you’re from around these depths, you can read it here; if not, I have translated it for you. The album got 8 out of 10 stars, the reviews was written by Goran Tarlać. Thanks to Bojana for the heads-up!
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On a road from a broken junkie, through the rehab survivor of the Peppers family, to a hyperproductive author he is now, this respected guitarist releases his best solo effort.
John Frusciante is still very good at nourishing his own little cult of the greatest active A-list guitarist of our times. In his case, it is not only about not fitting into the concrete schemes of r’n’r clowns, but also the absence of any possible mystifications, which even follow the B-list clowns pretty often. The Empyrean is showing this in a couple of places: for example, symbolically bringing Johnny Marr, one of the key figures of the indie waves (he’s on Enough Of Me and playing acoustic guitar on Central) together with the wild boy that is Flea.
After a heavy and bold nine minute instrumental Before The Beginning, the boiling point is already there in the second song. Song To The Siren is a Tim Buckley cover and a direct homage to Californian psychedelia. Past and lost days, shizofrenia and some kind of a sadness split all around are brought together to form the dominant feeling of this album. As introverted as can be, One More Of Me could as well be the highest point of the album, lyrics-wise (What’s gone will never come back / But it exists when you think of it). John will be 40 next year and he’s obviously aware that he can’t go smoothly down the sharp, sarcastic blade of the youth idealism.
Covering themes such as various faces of life (Dark/Light) or frustration with the higher power (Heaven), Frusciante is demonstrating a maestral walk alongside his old peer Josh Klinghoffer, a string quartet, a sampler, his exciting barriton, total noise…et cetera. The new album is functioning as weird, yet as perfect as his tirn jeans that might be getting stiff on the leather seats of expensive tour limos.
Freed from the desire to parody or promote specific genres, which was refreshing his efforts in the past and making them harder to swallow at the same time, Frusciante’s The Empyrean is an assuring proof that its author hasn’t forgotten his alternative outlets, not even in the times of his worldwide triumph. If David Bowie had the point when he said that the audience remembers only three things from someone’s career; then in case of RHCP, those three things would be: 1) socks; 2) drugs and (we’re arriving to our protagonist now) 3) riffs.
From the very take-off of his solo career (Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt, 1994), Frusciante’s been trying and mostly succeeding to develop a concept that won’t take him too far away from the ideals of the commercial underground. The Empyrean is somewhere along those lines as well, revealing the system according to which the author can take out a lot from the inner and social disfunctions and turn it into a r’n’r song. That’s where Frusciante’s basic strength and the key to his attractivity lie – regardless of how prone the listeners are to the intimate approach.
