Iowa State Daily review of TROWFTD
20th February 2001, Iowa State Daily (USA)
After descending into the depths of tortured fame followed by an early ’90s struggle with hardcore drugs, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante emerged and brought with him enough demons and emotions to fill his third solo album, “To Record Only Water for Ten Days.”
The album is quite different from Frusciante’s work with the Peppers, who most recently released 1999’s smash album “Californication.”
Frusciante’s solo creation is much less funky than anything on “Californication,” and for good reason. The depth and sobriety of the lyrics on the album would be hard to take seriously with the poppier rhythms of past Pepper albums.
The lyrical imagery pulls the listener into Frusciante’s heavy, introspective world.
“I answer these questions now/ As to why I’m the only one/ Who carries answers to their fathers/
Who carries grey sky to the sun,” he sings on “Away & Anywhere.”
On some songs, Frusciante’s voice sounds exposed and tinny, as if he were singing into an aluminum can.
Usually this could cause an album to sound cheap and poorly produced, but in Frusciante’s case, it only adds to the enchanting ruggedness of the whole package.
The stark vocals and lyrics neatly compliment Frusciante’s skilled guitar-work and synthesized beats to create soft electronic waves of sound that lap gently at the distant shores of the listener’s mind.
The result is an ambient rawness and simplicity that pervade every track on the album. But not raw in the sense of incomplete or lacking — raw in the sense of refreshingly stripped-down.
— Bethany Kohoutek
