Music
20 Mar 01

To Record Only Water For Ten Days

Third solo effort from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers axeman, (he made two wildly unsuccessful albums during his long sabbatical from the band in the nineties) this oddly titled collection will win him few new friends.

Largely devoid of the hard funk grind and clipped guitar textures that characterises the best of the Peppers' work, Frusciante instead goes for second-hand drum-machine rhythms and washy synths. His falsetto voice sounds strained and pained for the most part, while the unfinished demo feel and a lack of memorable tunes completes the sense of pointlessness.

That said 'Murderers', an instrumental, is mildly interesting if only for the brief respite from Frusciante's unrelenting vocal howl, while 'Fallout' could've made a half-decent Peppers B-side with a lot more work in the arrangement department. On the other hand tracks like the spacey 'Remain', an excruciating, indulgence and is, like much of this 15-track experiment, a melange of sonic ideas thrown at what clearly isn't a great song to start with.

If nothing else To Record Only Water For Ten Days proves conclusively that the Chilli Peppers (like most bands) are greater than the sum of their collective parts.