I think Flea, John Frusciante, and Chad Smith are pretty great-to-amazing players who seem to have been born to make music together. But then there's Anthony Kiedis. Look, there's a reason I'm writing this while and he's a mega rock star. This I know, this I have accepted. That aside -- I mean, come on. His voice isn't necessarily bad, for the most part. Sometimes, not bad even when he doesn't quite hit the note (honestly, that adds some character). But these lyrics? Well, you know what I'm going to say. It's almost cliche to criticize them for that at this point. Some of Kiedis' lyrical hooks work in the choruses ("Scar Tissue," "Otherside"), but even the opening track ("Around the World") stoops to near self-parody with the "bing-a-bap-a-doo-wap" or whatever line in the verse. But he does give Flea and Frusciante the opportunity to harmonize from time to time, and those are always pretty good. Just watch "Under the Bridge" on SNL. What I described above is represented across their discography, of course. Californication is no exception. All of that said, this is a decent but generally solid album, and to whom we can attribute this success is primarily Flea, Frusciante, and Smith. But I recommend going into it viewing the vocals as just another instrument. Which is, of course, true of every album (i.e., not limited to RHCP). It's just that on Californication, the more you view them that way, and the more you disregard the actual words, the more effective the album becomes. The highlight of the album, to me, is the trifecta of "Scar Tissue," "Otherside," and "Get on Top." These songs are preceded by the two opening tracks, and I'd rank these two just below the trifecta. "Around the World" starts as a barn burner that came to rip your face off, only to descend into a middling chorus. "Parallel Universe" is high energy throughout, but, if viewed singularly, is just all right. However, at its place in the album sequence, it works well. And it maintains the album's opening intensity better than the opening track. This leads us to the titular track -- "Californication." This is just all right, I begrudgingly guess. It makes sense to slow the album down at this point. I understand how people have always found the song catchy (especially the chorus), but it's not for me. I don't find it particularly interesting on any level. After that, the album oscillates between mid-level energy and very low energy (I really found the guitar tone/playing at the end of "Porcelain" very interesting, and it completely saves the song), but it never reaches the heights of the first five tracks. Although those tracks with "Road Trippin'" (the albums final track) tacked on after "Otherside" would have made for an unimpeachable EP. But an EP, this is not. The pacing of this album makes sense when viewed as a whole product, but the album started wearing out it's welcome by track nine, "I Like Dirt" (See? I told you to ignore the words), leaving six to nine more songs depending on the version you give a listen. For our purposes here, I am not counting bonus tracks when rating albums, but will call them out if they're great (they're not great here). With that said, we have a 15-track album I'm ready to turn off by the ninth track, and really only care for a third of the songs. And of course, we must address the following: it is painfully obvious that this album is compressed to hell as part of the "loudness wars," but I feel like that aesthetic fits the album more often than not. I'm giving this album three stars (2.5 stars if a half star was an option). I wouldn't object to listening, but I wouldn't request it. The album is more like a great EP (the first five tracks) with some other stuff they wrote tacked onto it to justify an album. These tacked on songs are far from incompetent, they're just...there.
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