The Red Hot Chili Peppers are once again working on a new album, and with the writing process nearly complete, beloved bassist Flea has confirmed a strongly upbeat nature to the tracks. Also, water is wet.
The buoyant bassist told Rolling Stone that the band’s new music – which consists of about 30 new songs – is “super danceable, funky sh*t and some real introspective, pretty stuff.”
“We’re nearly finished writing,” he said. “We’ll go in the studio sometime in the next couple of months.”
The new RHCP album will be the second for guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who replaced the band’s not-so-secret weapon John Frusciante in 2009, just prior to recording the 2011 album I’m With You. However, the band have taken some heat in recent years over both lackluster performances and Klinghoffer’s struggles to fill Frusciante’s enormous vacant shoes.
Frusciante’s pitch-perfect falsettos, beaming grins and spastic guitar wizardry that yielded jaw-dropping solos, extended intros/outros and beyond, are a sorely missed feature of the current incarnation of RHCP, though to his credit Klinghoffer has come quite a long way in his efforts to create his own RHCP identity. However, he just doesn’t possess the magic, or the backing vocal chops, to avoid standing out as a lesser-than replacement. We saw the man at his finest at Lollapalooza 2012 in Chicago when he played as if his life depended on it, but on home turf a year later, the Californication rockers were rough around the edges and fell short of the epic finale Coachella truly deserved.
I’m With You was a strong album, however. So we’ll reserve judgement until the next record, and try to forget the numerous times frontman Anthony Kiedis seemed like a shadow of himself onstage, low on energy and leaving the entirety of onstage banter to the charismatic Flea. In the meantime, we can enjoy a hilariously good/bad RHCP spoof track from Comedy Bang Bang and our friend Cyrus from Hot Karate.
Photo: Johnny Firecloud
