The Red Hot Chili Peppers- The Getaway (2016)

The Red Hot Chili Peppers- The Getaway (2016)

By: Ghost Writer

I came to knew about the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the late 80s, I was barely a teenager into Thrash Metal, but with a deep love for 70s music, so the funk band in the RHCP's music was not exactly a surprise to me, I have as a curious kid and I was very well musically aware of James Brown, The Meters and George Clinton, and mainly through Clinton precisely, I made the connection with the Peppers, Clinton produced that little curious recording called Freaky Styley, a bunch of LA white guys playing something part The Meters, part Funkadelic was truly revolutionary at the time, yes, the Bad Brains were also including funk as a part of their volatile mix, the Beastie Boys had Fight for you Right and Aerosmith had recorder with rap greats Run DMC, but the Peppers were something else, a seamless conjunction of the warm sounds of funk and wild rock n roll, I was as even more hooked on the mercurial The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, the record I consider the true birth of the band, from then on, the band became a favorite of mine, later, I assume, a little bit lost after the success of 1999,s Californication, from then on, with the modest exceptions of By the Way and I'm with You, records that captured a band escaping from m massive success and looking to regain its teenage exuberance filtered through the achieved maturity.

So is The Getaway finally the RHCP arriving to that long sought maturity stage? No, but the band sounds more adapted than ever to being on that eternal trip, releasing a bunch of little melancholic gently free floating funk, The Getaway is not exactly the best RHCP have recorded n years, but is a perfectly well performed piece of music, the superb rhythm section composed by bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith is perhaps the album's strongest feature, guitarist Josh Kinghoffer seems still on the search of a distinctive guitar style and sounding a little bit lost in the mix, while singer Anthony Kiedis is simply happy doing his thing, putting his distinctive style on the Peppers music.

In The Getaway, the Peppers sound happy riding the wave of idolized warm sounds from the 70s, followed more prominently by bands like Daft Punk and The Strokes, on songs like the title track, first single Dark Necessities and the heavy hitting We Turn Red featuring a John Bonzo Bonham like drumming intro by Smith, but the problem plaguing the latest RHCP records is called filler, you get a couple of good songs and a bunch of ones that simply go nowhere and while Goodbye Angels is mildly amusing, The Longest Wave is truly boring despite Kinghoffer beautiful and delicate playing, and while Sick Love  shows promise with certain things interesting 70s soft rock motifs, Go Robots with its reference to the early 80s, is really embarrassing.

Some listeners will be delighted by the references to late 60s garage rock feature in Detroit and in the This Ticonderoga, but nothing ends up being remarkable, just closer Dreams of a Samurai show a little amusing playing by the band, and it's turns out as a shame that the band prefers to keep moving slowly, not running into the danger of doing something radically new, if the RHCP are aimed ng at becoming a classic mature band, they are also becoming a very boring one here.