Intro.de review of The Will To Death
From Intro.de
Thanks to Lira, for translation.
Music can save lives. Music can heal wounds, convey comfort, afford catharsis. Music can be the most important thing in the world. According to John Frusciante, he became aware of this the first time when he was eleven years old, when he didn’t know where to put all his energy, until he discovered the guitar for himself. He feels confident that back then music saved his life. And since then music does this continuously, day by day, be it in the role of the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers or as a soloist. How else could this almost maniac devotedness be explained, he devotes himself to his art. It even seems, that he dissolves and distills in that devotion, and reinvents himself with every album, every song. Music as a substitute for magic, the guitar as a totem, the voice as a deep link in a shamanistic lavation of vision quest.
Pathos alert? Maybe. But it’s for sure, for an artist like Frusciante, life, spirituality and music can’t be separated. Every note he ever composed and released and every line seems to be an indispensable part of a minute report, that portray the never completed history of a unique personality in all of its facets: times of agony brought by drugs, which brought out the fascinating 1997’s album “Smile From The Streets You Holdâ€; the frisky, wavy phase shortly after the turn of the millennium; and now the tender and gloomy preoccupation with mortality, death, the end. Fanciful, lyrical, but never slide into kraut(rock), but rather amazingly catchy “The Will To Death†impresses with its coarse production that sit well on the spontaneous character of the songs, that are mainly tranquil. Frusciante deals with his injuries with childish-naive fervor and communicates with a mixture of Lo-Fi(low fidelity)-R.E.M., unplugged Hüsker-Dü and DIY-Elton John plus lots of early-90s -indie-melancholia and this touching vocal lines, that are characteristic for him. The piano is used often, the melodies and structures tend to be earworms and ,now and then, even epically. And the vocals affect me deeply with their exposed and fragile vehemence, sometimes it affects me almost too much. A gorgeous and profoundly emotional album. Be anxious to what will come next, because “The Will To Death†is just the first one of a series of albums, John Frusciante recorded this year and plans to release. It is obvious: Like pretty much every record the next one will be a surprising stunner, too.
