Red Hot Chili Peppers to release second double-album of 2022, "Return of the Dream Canteen" 10/14/22

You’re not alone

 

This has indeed been repressed and copies are out in the wild, keep your eyes peeled! Snagged one the other day -- KG and SH in the deadwax! Can't wait to give this puppy a spin at last!

 

Nice! You in the UK?

 

John's third chat with Rick Rubin is now up:

 

I will say a handful of Dream Canteen songs have grown on me…

 

RHCP Content Dump is prob my album of the year.

 

Man, they started getting into specific songs in the second half and I looked at the running time and was like ah man, they don't have enough time to do a lot of this. And then they didn't really stick to it so they didn't even get as much in as they could have. But, at least this time they actually just cut the conversation into parts instead of reconvening later. Next part is next week.

 

I think this is fairly typical of RHCP. It's one of those intangible reasons to love them. The whole band is playing together. Not laying down tracks, or at least it sounds that way. I love it when bands back up a solo rather than just play the parts the same way. Zeppelin was great at this too. Music today is like looped verse chorus same beat the same way with no change because that wouldn't be an "even" sound. The loop sounds even. But a real band should be a living breathing organism playing on every note as a human. Not a machine. The solo is enhanced when it's not played 100 times and the best take chosen, but when the band and the solo are as one.

 

Just a note for those harping on AK's lyrics as the weak link...granted, some can be silly and ridiculous, but plenty are funny, clever and often more.

But I think there's a middle category--those that perhaps seem ridiculous, but only because the listener (reader) has no idea what he's talking about.

For example, in "Peace And Love," one of the verses is:


Staley, are you out there? I am in your lane

Catch that cup of water when it falls

Wait for me, darling, I’ll be on that train

Cat man had a message for us all


So if you're not an Alice in Chains fan, you're not going to get the Layne Staley reference in the first line, and presumably even many AIC fans may not know about Layne's affinity for cats, i.e. he's the "cat man." (Heck, I don't remember exactly what it was, but they spelled Staley wrong in the lyrics book, I think it says "Staly" or something, not sure if intentional or not...)

Point being, to most people, that verse is probably just a big WTF? So regarding any lyrics/lines/verses/whatever that are WTF to me personally, I always give AK the benefit of the doubt that there's probably something to it that I'm just not getting, but that it's probably not just pure gibberish!

 

Pure gibberish is underrated!... sometimes it just works.

 

It's cool when John Frusciante is talking about the band and specific songs, but the psuedo-philosophical stuff by Rick Rubin is tiring.

 

this forum is obsessed with The Beatles and half their songs are pure gibberish.

I’ve never been one to care too much about the lyrics. Is it a great time I can sing along to? If yes. Nothing else really matters.

 

Deliberately avoided this thread until I'd fully assimilated the album - didn't want to endure the same puerile crapping about specific songs that led me to question my positive early opinions of certain UL tracks. Yeah sure, there's the same idiocy with blowhards opining on the album or specific songs after 2 or 3 days, but that's par for the course here.

IMO, although UL is a great album, ROTDC is another level, and probably their best since the days of MM & BSSM. Just not getting the negativity towards My Cigarette, and particularly In The Snow, which is outstanding, a perfect closer, and possibly their finest soft song. (The only thing that originally spoiled it for me was the similarity of the 'roll over, roll over' part to that stupid kids' song 'There were x in the bed and the little one said, "Roll over, roll over", so they all rolled over and one fell out...there were x-1 in the bed,' etc etc. But I'm over that now.)

As for the lyrics, as others have pointed out, they're probably too subtle for all the knuckle-draggers. Their problem.

 

For me, I rarely go back to Unlimited Love, outside of about 6 songs. But Dream Canteen is basically top to bottom fantastic. Much better variety than UL.

 

i have the exact opposite feelings towards the two albums.
i still love Unlimited Love, but only like about half of Dream Canteen.

Dream Canteen literally has some of the worst RHCP songs, imo, and i still laugh how everybody loves that solo in Eddie, but to me it's just noisy, messy garbage....doesn't sound good at all to me.

 

I expended most of my Chili Peppers energy on Unlimited Love and was sorta winded by the time Dream Canteen came around. Haven't given it as many listens as it deserves, but def enjoy all of it.

 

I haven't listened to UL since RotDC came out, but only because I needed to give focus to the new album and continuing to listen to both of them, I thought, would be RHCP overload. I listened to UL about 35+ times. Maybe once I've heard RotDC that much, I'll put UL back in rotation. Maybe not that much. I also had put UL on once a week after the first 6 weeks or so, so it was regulated, but still consistent so as to become familiar with the songs.

 

I can understand people having a clear preference for one album > the other. I don’t massively understand people loving one album and disliking the other, whichever way around their preference.

The material comes from the same sessions and don’t strike me as that different qualitatively.

It doesn’t feel like a Load / Reload situation to me, where one album, the initial one, is clearly stronger - here, they knew they’d do two albums at the time they were curating the sequencing, so the quality seems relatively even.

 

Today is the band's 40th birthday:

Me and My Friends #51 - 40 years of the Red Hot Chili Peppers • Buttondown

 

Wow, never realized how big a Depeche Mode fan John was. Was this already well-documented? Would love to hear/read him talk about it more.

EDIT: Wow, he's got Violator as his #7 favorite album ever.

From Jimi Hendrix to Joy Division: John Frusciante’s 40 favourite albums of all time

 

Even better:

Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) at #6

 

Equally interesting how little funk makes the Top 40. I guess we knew that already from his solo stuff.

His RHCP band mates worshipped at the altar of not only Funkadelic (just the one album makes the cut), but also Parliament, Sly, the Meters, The O’Jays etc). John, obviously less so, and I suppose we hear it in the band since he’s ascended to musical primacy.

I was also surprised at how much progressive music makes the list - it’s kind of a prog and early electronic dominated list, with a smattering of post punk. Relatively little “classic rock” bar single album nods to Bowie, Hendrix and Zep.

There are a number of artists on this list I’ve never heard of, either.

 

He straight-up says in Podcast #3 (I think) that when he rejoined RHCPs for Californication he was *not* excited by rock music. Johnny Ramone turned him on to '50s music and apparently that did the trick.

 

While there is rock music I like that was created in this current century, I will say that you hit the nail on the head in regards to my one big criticism of many rock bands today and how albums are recorded, which is that much of it is does not really capture the performance of a band playing together and off of one another. So many albums feel and sound largely like the music and performances are put together on a computer where everything is time synced perfectly.

These new RHCP albums do sound like a band playing together and off one another, which I love. I do think Dream Canteen is their best album in many years, and I really like Unlimited Love as well. I was not expecting this from them in 2022.