MTV.com review of Smile
1998, from mtv.com
A former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist who joined the band when Hillel Slovak died of an overdose in 1988, John Frusciante himself was teetering on the brink of death when he made this record. Midway through the Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik tour in 1992, Frusciante dropped out of public life, slipping into a black quicksand of depression and then (as he describes it) dragged himself halfway out with heroin and art. He recorded music on his four-track and, in 1994, American Recordings released the resulting song fragments on Frusciante’s first solo record, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt. Now on the tiny Birdman Records, a Burbank, CA-based indie, the artist remarked to a Los Angeles journalist last year: “I don’t care whether I live or die.”
So is it any wonder that Smile From The Streets You Hold takes you places where you wouldn’t normally go? The album is fascinating like a car wreck. Part of the challenge is surrendering to its strangeness – call it “outsider art” set to guitar. Forget about anything trad and comfortable like a drum beat or a tame, decipherable lyric. The music is disjointed, dark, and dreamlike, and Frusciante’s rambling, from-the-gut emoting makes him sound like he’s howling at the moon, from the unsteady jangle of Enter a Uh and the thick, sultry ambiance of A Fall Thru the Ground to the elliptical I’m Always and Well, I’ve Been.
Smile From The Streets You Hold is beyond extreme: at first, it’s practically unlistenable. But there are hidden treasures in Frusciante’s speaking-in-tongues vocals and even slices of humor as he slips in a sample of his hero, David Bowie. The implicit deal is that you have to take a step into Frusciante’s drug-addled netherworld, so it’s no surprise that the record’s press release smacks of a dare: “Are you brave enough to go there?” Dig deep enough and you feel the spark of Frusciante’s talent still intact in his guitar work; delve deeper and he’s subversive and scary. For those willing to take that step, one key to Frusciante’s mind might be the lines from I’m Always: “Someone told me that you’d better close your eyes.” In the dark, he rants and raves, making love to his own personal devils and angels, all of which makes Smile From The Streets You Hold a harrowing album that reveals a few moments of bristling, desperate virtuosity.
—Sarah Scribner
