There's quite a bit to like on Chili Peppers' double disc
How many rock bands have the creative spark, staying power, or raw nerve to release a 28-track double CD more than 20 years into their career? About as many as have a bass player named Flea. While creating a simultaneously genre-defining and genre-defying catalog, checkered with boisterous highs and banal lows, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have managed various combinations of spark, stamina, and cheeky spirit. But rarely have the attributes all come together as often as they do on ''Stadium Arcadium," the Peppers' ninth studio album, out today.
Produced by longtime collaborator Rick Rubin and recorded in the same house as ''Blood Sugar Sex Magik," the group's multiplatinum 1991 breakthrough, ''Stadium Arcadium" is a sprawling smorgasbord of a disc that both aims for the old funkadelic slam-dance party of ''Magik" and takes an ambitious stab at making a classic rock statement. About what is unclear: The sanctity of funk? The holiness of groove? We're still trying to divine the message behind titling the CDs ''Jupiter" and ''Mars," respectively.
The occasional whiff of bankable formula (''Storm in a Teacup," for instance, sounds like a rewrite of ''Give It Away" from ''Blood Sugar Sex Magik") and frontman Anthony Kiedis's propensity for grating sing-song rhymes make one wonder if more than two dozen tracks were really warranted. That said, there are many high points here -- a trove of them actually -- to qualify ''Stadium Arcadium" as not only one of the Peppers' strongest, most coherent efforts, but a shining showcase for guitarist John Frusciante in particular.
On selections such as the single, ''Dani California," ''Turn It Again," and the title track, the man who has long stood in the shadow of rubber-wristed bassist Flea and mini-Iggy Kiedis steps into the spotlight to deliver a sonic tutorial in taste, texture, and technique. His tempestuous solos, gleaming with Eddie Hazel flash and drenched in a Hendrixian haze, elevate otherwise decent tracks like ''C'mon Girl" and ''Slow Cheetah" to summits of cool.
The Chili Peppers (which also include drummer Chad Smith) have always resembled a furious four-man carnival in constant, pinwheeling motion. They are day-glo whirling dervishes impervious to the trends that have come and gone since the early '80s, when the group first mashed together its freaky-styley take on punk, funk, and West Coast skateboard culture.
Likewise, a loose-limbed exuberance and casual authority informs ''Stadium Arcadium" -- it's the sound of a band not breaking substantial new ground, perhaps, but effortlessly reveling in the uniqueness of its sound the sum of a ground-breaking legacy.
