Californication - Red Hot Chili Peppers > Reviews > Red Red Hot Hot Hot Chilli Peppers

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Definitely a cut above the rest
Lyrics	Thought-provoking
Quality and consistency of tracks	A couple of weak links
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money

Advantages:	plenty of good songs, good lyrics and music
Disadvantages:	the album could lose a couple of tracks to make it better

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

After hearing Scar Tissue and Californication when round a mate’s house on MTV, it seemed impossible not to buy this album, especially after hearing that it had gone platinum over forty times world-wide.

I did not really know what the ‘Peppers’ were about, what kind of music they played (well, I knew it was rock) or what kind of style they had. I knew their previous album (blood sex and magic or something) had gone down really well, and that this was a brilliant follow-up to it.

The first six tracks on this album are basically faultless. Around the World (number one) starts with this magic guitar riff, and expect this from the rest of the album. This is followed by Parallel Universe then Scar Tissue, one of the hits of the album. Basically every line of the verses ends with a ‘…aaaawwww’ sounding word like ‘saw’, ‘all’, ‘brawl’ etc the American accent used is obviously better than me writing it to describe what it is like! ‘With the birds I’ll share this lonely view’ is the chorus, repeated many times seems to make you a bit addicted to it! Otherside is a slower song about one man’s pain and his thoughts about suicide. Get On Top is a faster song, again with a good guitar riff. Then the brilliant Californication. Accompanied with an excellent animated video, the song contains basically all ‘tion’ words ever created! Not a slow song, but it is quite gentle to begin with until the guitars come into the song, makes the song more complete when they do.

I could write more and more about he rest of the songs, but those are the main decent songs on the album, finished off by the recently released Road Trippin’. Generally, this album has a lot of excellent guitar riffs, and the lyrics are sung with a tremendous American way of singing. Hard to describe, but you will realise how an English band could not pull off these kind of tracks. The lyrics are decent, do not be put off by what I said about Scar Tissue or Californication with the verse endings sounding the same, just genius song writing rather than someone finding words that rhyme. There is a good mixture of quite slow and faster songs which gives the album excellent variation, and makes you want to listen to all the fifteen songs on the album, and as it lasts near to an hour you get good value for money.

If you like the rock scene but are not too keen on the whole nu-metal scene which seems to be taking off, then this a CD you can quite easily relax to, or in fact listen to if you are preparing to go out and what to get into a good bit of music.