Glazba.monitor.hr review of Inside of Emptiness
26th November 2004, from Glazba.monitor.hr (Croatia)
translated by me
John Frusciante is probably the man who least used the fact that he plays in a huge rock band. Some others’ instruments on solo albums sound the same as the stuff they do when they’re following the flock, some others are easily-recognisable because of their voices, some are not changing their style at all and some at least put a sticker on their CDs to remind people what they’re known for. This guy here hasn’t done any of that. He wasn’t doing so back in the days when he was publishing his albums in a more healthy manner and he isn’t doing so this year upon tossing himself in a publishing blitzkrieg either. Although he’s, you know, playing guitar in that rock band of his, on his solo albums he doesn’t sound the same, he’s using his voice much more and the style is light years away. There are no stickers on these beautiful digipack albums either, they’d just destroy them. So, this is only John Frusciante, a man who’s recording music.
It seems that Frusciante will achieve his mad plan to publish six + one albums within a year. This year he’s already put out Shadows Collide With People and The Will To Death. They were followed by Automatic Writing, the album that’s signed as Ataxia’s, Ataxia being the band he formed with Joe and Josh. Then there was another effort of his own, DC EP, and now there’s Inside Of Emptiness. Two more releases are scheduled for this year, A Sphere In The Heart of Silence and Curtains. If we calculated that well, that will have been seven albums in less than one year. Gosh, that is a lot.
According to some logic, pre-production of some of these albums would be bullshit. And they aren’t. It’s obvious that the albums were made in a short period of time, though. And it’s not because they’re being published at such speed, as he could’ve been recording them for years in order to publish them at this pace; it’s because of the present mood and sound. The most of the albums are based on his rough voice and psychodelic guitar, with added rhytm from the side. The man was obviously going through a slightly depressive period, so that is what his albums sound like, especially those from third to fifth. I suppose that Frusciante wasn’t really training himself to record this and that he would just go to the studio and try to transmit his sadness at the very moment. Sometimes he was gloomy, so he’d sound suicidal, sometimes he was angry so he’d sound revolted. As he reached the fifth album, he got rid of his anger and annulated his depression, so his sad soul had some ease.
‘Inside Of Emptiness’ does not contain any of the punk-seeds that Frusciante seeded on the first two albums this year and it’s not madly depriming as all of the summer albums. This album is reasonably harsh and psychodelic. It fits well with the (non)production at the first take…because a man who sits alone in studio with his guitar does seem a bit psychotic and lonely and, at certain points, he seems to be in a good mood. Unlike the previous four albums he published this year which were only transmitting the mood, these pieces have constitution common to more usual songs, they’re not too slow and they seem to be following a certain story, so you’ll hear lines such as I never meant what I’ve done to you or Give me your hands, give me your hands, give me your haaands. Actually, these ten songs seem to be over and done with, but they’re not that similar amongst them, so these almost-forty-minutes do not look like one song; they’re more likely to be one versatile album made by a man to whom bitterness is one of the tastes he feels in his mouth more often than others.
Probably the best album in the series.
—Kruno BoÅ¡njaković
