Red Hot Chili Peppers - One Hot Minute Audio CD
A fair review of the Red Hot Chili Peppers "One Hot Minute" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all
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A lull artistically, commercially and critically. But it wasn't fatal. I pre ordered this and still have the free sticker they gave you for doing so. OK I have a confession to make. So keep that in mind Pepperites later on in the review when I am less than sold on this disc. OK?
Released in 1995 this album was the follow up to the ridiculously successful Blood Sugar Sex Magik opus and the Chilis are to be soundly praised for not just trying to repeat the formula. Used as a single, Warped opens up the albums account with pretty much the closest thing to heavy metal on the album, swirling sounds devolving into a vortex of circular sounds, a feeling used as inspiration for the video. However things move into more familiar quirky rock with track two, Aeroplane.
Taken as a whole this was a brave move in some ways as the band take their predilections to their logical conclusion and the results - such as the rockin' paeon to thinking for yourself Shallow Be Thy Name - are sometimes pretty good. However overly simplistic stuff like Pea doesn't really 'do it'. Funk rock structures abound and for an example of this sample yourself One Big Mob or Deep Kick or . . . well most of the album actually is still replete with this bouncy vibe this band pretty much owned on BSSM.
It's also nice to see the band try a few different studio tricks and experiment with new things such as the childrens choir on the aforementioned Aeroplane. As per my earlier statement, the band didn't just try to do BSSM pt2.
But there are problems. Last album, all this was fresh to many in the mainstream and had the element of surprise. Here many of these tricks we've seen before, the overly self conscious 'wacky' musical behaviour. And the problems arise when this descends from wacky to stupid. Like the silly romper room choral inflections on Deep Kick.
Critically this was a bust. It seemed to me at the time to mark the beginning of the end as sales were down, excitement and hype trailed off and even though I thought parts of this were brave it seems the mass public only had the patience/indulgence levels required to accept one album of funk-o-matic hard rock from these guys. And the band took the lesson to heart, morphing into something else entirely and have a second bite at the cherry, producing great music of a different hue.
But all up this isn't their best by far and really only rates three stars.
Classic Chili Peppers
" If you love the Chili Peppers, you will love this CD! The only negative thing I would say is that it does contain a lot of swear words, so you need to be careful if your pre-teen is listening in. This is an excellent CD, and I loved almost every track with favorites being "My Friend" and "Aeroplane.
This was hot for only about a minute
There are many less-then-funky choices going on here which keep this album from even becoming uniformly good, dragging these sessions down into noisy creative conflict instrumentally at odds with each other. 2 1/2
Perhaps not their absolute worst material (there still seems to be more fire involved on the whole then their extremely competent though mostly lobotomized current work) , but probably the disc with the biggest identity crisis.
Very surprising album
The poppy (for lack of a better word) sound of their music from that album onwards were what got me hearing them in the first place. Now, to set the record straight, I only started listening to RHCP's music after Californication and I was weaned on hits like GET ON TOP and DON'T STOP. I never knew what albums like One Hot Minute and Blood Sugar Sex Magik sounded like. So I thought why not start on some of them.
So there I was, listening to One Hot Minute and I thought it really sucked. I was convinced it sucked because it sounded so different from their latter albums. I also knew the hype of this album before I plunged in, Dave Navvaro taking over as lead guitarist and all that, so I was prepared to hate it alot.
But I started listening more. Then I started listening more after that. The sounds really weren't bad after a few listenings. Then as I listened to my favorites again (Coffee Shop, My friends, Aeroplane, Walkabout), I began thinking that this album might just be the best I've heard from the group. What a turnaround!
The pace of the songs are sort of slower to my relatively untrained ear and the sounds are darker and sadder like they said, but the catchy guitar rhythms started surfacing in the songs and me, being a guitar player who likes catchy riffs, really found myself swinging to the unique beats of this album. They were that good.
Make no mistake, this album is very different from Californication and upwards, but I guarantee you will find yourself liking the sounds nevertheless.
Now, I don't even recall me liking CAN'T STOP and GET ON TOP. That's a great testament to the greatness of this album.
Better Than Expected
I remember liking this early on in High School, but as with a lot of things I enjoyed back then, I imagined it not holding up over the years. Listening to this album for the first time in literally 13 years, I am shocked at how much I enjoy it. Plus, since then, I've stopped enjoying Blood Sugar Sex Magik, their most famous and (at least on Rate Your Music) most highly rated album.
This album has little of the funk that ended up boring me with Blood Sugar Sex Magik, just enough to keep the sound interesting. Instead, it has a lot of the fuzzy guitars that were prevalent in mid-90's Alternative music. The songs are quirky, the sound changes from track to track, and the album is almost heavy at times. It has an enjoyable experimental feel to it.
I was intending to listen to this album as a trip down memory lane, but I think I'm going to put it on a semi-regular rotation.
You can see a complete list of all Red Hot Chili Peppers discography, or go back to the Red Hot Chili Peppers tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.