Red Hot Chili Peppers — Return of The Dream Canteen — Album Review
Rock | Funk | Indie
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For many of you reading, you may already know just how much of my teenhood revolved around listening to the classic tunes of California band Red Hot Chili Peppers. For those of who that don’t, I’ll give you a hint; it was a lot.
I have seemingly spent a good chunk of my musical 2022 listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers as well. However, this has much more to do with the fact that it has been quite the productive year for them.
As it stands now in 2022, RHCP have released not one, but two whole studio albums; both apparently standing as double albums respectively. For the former, titled Unlimited Love, you can read my review of said album by clicking here. For the latter, This very review will be covering such a record.
This latter, and most recent album is titled Return of The Dream Canteen. It also stands as the band’s thirteenth studio album. But not only has 2022 seemed to stand as a promising year on paper due to the two albums they had released; the return of Guitarist John Frusciante also allowed excitement to rise amongst fans.
With that said, 2022 seemed to be a ripe time for Red Hot Chili Peppers to finally squash the growing worry that their style was becoming slowly more and more redundant, samey, or a mixture of the two. And while Unlimited Love was an enjoyable album in its own right, that feeling unfortunately stuck around. After listening to it, I was thinking to myself “yep, it’s another Red Hot Chilis album alright”. Little to nothing about the album allowed it to stick out from the rest as a truly unique piece. Nevertheless, I was still slightly hopeful that with a strike two, the Chilis would finally fulfil the wishes of many fans.
The teaser tracks for Return of The Dream Canteen didn’t give too much away to be honest. If anything, it felt even more closely connected to the Red Hot Chili Peppers template that we are perhaps a little too familiar with. While “Tippa my Tongue” was still an enjoyable bop, it still reeked of the aforementioned over-familiarities. As for “Eddie”, it was even more so, to an unenjoyable extent.
When the rest of the album came out, I perchance noticed what the band were attempting to do; go back to the basics of their sound. With the overall soundscape of the album being more reminiscent of their first flock of albums, I could both notice and admire this, to an extent. However, there’s a lack of iconic character that unfortunately meant that the aforementioned elements didn’t really count for much at all.
With the usual same old, same old (that even makes Unlimited Love feel like a unique album), the length of this album didn’t help either. With 17 songs, and a whopping runtime of an hour-and-a-quarter, the Return of The Dream Canteen experience was patience-testing to say the least.
Return of The Dream Canteen is not an inherently bad album, by any means. However, it stands as nothing but one more stamp in the RHCP discography, and adds nothing new to their aesthetic at all. It pains me to say this, but albums like the two we have received from the Chilis this year only strengthen the suggestion that perhaps this band has ridden their musical horse into the dirt, and should perhaps dismount now in order to keep their classics sacred.
Favourite Tracks: Afterlife | The Drummer
Least Favourite Tracks: Eddie | My Cigarette
Warner Records
