Red Hot Chili Peppers — Unlimited Love — Album Review
Funk | Rock
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What is there left to be said about the Californian funk rock quadruple Red Hot Chili Peppers that hasn’t been said already? I am one of many that were fortunate enough to have enjoyed the Red Hot Chilis growing up, as the band took over a very large chunk of my musical teenhood.
Red Hot Chili Peppers have a style unlike any other rock band in the world. thanks to the poetic and borderline surrealist vocal delivery from frontman Anthony Kiedis especially, the band’s sound have garnered an aesthetic that is so recognisable, that it is often joked about at this point. It is certainly fair to say that (with a few exceptions), Red Hot Chili peppers have stuck to this aesthetic pretty tightly; I mean, why fix something that isn’t broken?
But the finest moments the band have had have been shared with guitarist John Frusciante, who finally joins the band once again for their first record together since 2006’s Stadium Arcadium. This return of Frusciante was certainly cause for high anticipation when it came to the release of the band’s twelfth studio album.
Titled Unlimited Love, this album was first teased by the track “Black Summer”, which was released earlier this year. As one would expect with the return of Frusciante, this track settled in far more comfortably into the Chilis discography than pretty much any track on the band’s previous album, 2016’s The Getaway. And while the track itself is solid but not anything too mind-blowing, it was safe to say that Red Hot Chili Peppers felt like a complete ensemble once again.
This anticipation only heightened further with the release of “Poster Child”, the second teaser track to herald the arrival of Unlimited Love. There was certainly enough groove on that track to make myself and other fans hopeful that the Chilis would strike gold once again.
For the most part, the expectations that Unlimited Love would undoubtedly sound like an album from Red Hot Chili Peppers were met. Particularly in the album’s opening leg, there was a large handful of tracks that spelt a grand and familiar return of the band.
That isn’t to say however, that the album is without its more mellow and slow-burning tracks either. While some of these tracks I speak of were still highly enjoyable, there seemed like so many of these kinds of songs, that many got lost to the curse of being forgettable. The issue with those tracks, primarily, is that we’ve already been so spoiled by other tracks in the Chilis discography, that many of the tracks on here fall to the wayside somewhat. Considering that the band have been going strong for so long, it is perhaps the over-familiarity of the tracks on this project (although enjoyable in some respects, as I mentioned earlier), that could be its biggest point of criticism.
While I love much of the album now, the certainty that this project will remain one of the finer moments in the Chilis discography remain to be realised. I still believe that Red Hot Chili Peppers could free up a little more room for pushing the boat out, whilst also retaining their iconic style. Contrary to The Getaway, which had the opposite problem, the band have now swung the pendulum in a different direction completely.
But with a tracklist of 17-strong, and a runtime of well over an hour, Unlimited Love is certainly a generous album, to say the very least. Not to mention all of the groovy goodness that we get from the project. Perhaps I may be a bit too stuck in the way of “every album needs to push the band forward”, but this record certainly keeps the band just as enjoyable as they always have been.
Favourite Tracks: Aquatic Mouth Dance | Poster Child | The Heavy Wing
Least Favourite Track: Let ‘Em Cry
Warner Records
