I'm With You is a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. No shit, right? It's a point worth repeating because not only is it the most important thing about I'm With You, it's the only important thing about I'm With You. None of the actively recording Peppers-level elite-- not Metallica, not Coldplay, not U2, not Green Day-- have been more consistently and richly rewarded for simply showing up and being themselves. Since Californication kickstarted a second sustained run of monster popularity, the Peppers have not bitterly divided their fanbase over the way their drums were recorded, nor have they gone outside their inner circle for a bold sonic reconstruction. None of their albums were considered kinda hitless duds, and even their samey double-LP wasn't scoffed at as ambitious but more of the same. They've released nearly identical, bittersweet songs about California, sex, and, increasingly, nothing. These songs chart the same and appear on albums that perform nearly identically. All the while, the band continues to sell a ton of copies as the rest of us openly mock Anthony Kiedis (simply by quoting Anthony Kiedis) and find some nice things to say about John Frusciante.
But I'm With You is their first record without Frusciante since 1995's turgid, Dave Navarro-helmed One Hot Minute. A former tour understudy for Frusciante, new axeman Josh Klinghoffer blends in with a slightly more textural and less chopsy style, and he thankfully doesn't impose his will on the Peppers like the glam-metal narcissist Navarro did. But in the grand scheme of things, it means nothing. Tremendously dumb lead single "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" picks up where prior tremendously dumb lead single "Dani California" left off-- which is to say, totally within PeppersWorld, a place where an incorporeal female is a prop for Kiedis to drop happy-go-lucky jewels about cockblocking, rockin' like the 1980s, and god knows what else. Over the past decade, the band's had incredible instincts about their choice of singles, the deep cuts rightfully forgotten by all but the dieheards. But while "Maggie" is by a large measure the worst thing here, it foreshadows I'm With You's paucity of overtly choice options, "good Chili Peppers" and "bad Chili Peppers" coming ever closer to a horizon point.
More than ever, three extremely talented musicians are all in servitude to Kiedis, the single most irreplaceable frontman in rock history: Seriously, there are plenty of singers who can do a passable Bono or Ozzy or Robert Plant in a pinch, but who's fuckin' with Kiedis' sixteens? Granted, they've never been a source of much food for thought, but at least it worked when the band appeared to be riffing from the reptile brain that craved women, drugs, and party plans, "uplift mofo" or otherwise. Here, unless Kiedis is being totally explicit about his subject matter ("Annie Wants a Baby", "Police Station"), I'm With You is simply a continuously futile pursuit to figure out what the fuck he's actually talking about.
On "Factory of Faith", spiritual intransigence is described as such: "All my life, I was swingin' for the fence/ Always lookin' for the triple/ Never playing good defense." Then, before you know it, he's quoting Dirk Diggler ("feast on this"). He falls in love with a stripper on "Look Around", explaining "Hustle here/ Hustle there/ Hustle me bitch and you best beware/ It's emotional/ And I told you so." (This is before Fayetteville-- North Carolina? Arkansas?-- gets a shout out… because it rhymes with "say it will.") The tricky funk rhythm of "Ethiopia" stoically withstands Kiedis singing a scat version of "Old McDonald Had a Farm", while on "Even You Brutus?" he yawps like David Byrne and courts a young lady by namedropping Steve Miller and Stevie Wonder in the span of fifteen seconds.
Thing is, he can shut off that Funky Monk mode in time for the choruses, and if I'm With You proves anything for the Peppers, it's that a one-step solution to making this a better, even enjoyable record is to cut out the verses entirely. Sounds like a good enough idea, but it'd only make it more obvious that they've been writing minor variations of the same exact (admittedly effective) chorus for the past decade: four repeating chords boxing in Kiedis' maxed-out soul croon as Flea and Chad Smith dutifully swing, wondering when they'll finally have a chance to let loose. (When they do during the frenetic coda of "Brendan's Death Song", it's a damn revelation.)
Some of us will be making “Sir Psycho Sexy” jokes to our grave, but many still have a soft spot for the wild abandon of Blood Sugar Sex Magik because it found space for rock songs that rocked, funk songs that were funky, and ballads that were truly affecting. But they've become so stuck in their Peppers-Mk-II ways that 2006's Stadium Arcadium turned out to be possibly the least adventurous double album ever, and I'm With You does even less to pursue sonic diversity*.* Much of the blame lies with Rick Rubin: As with Stadium and 2002's By the Way, he produces I'm With You entirely without nuance or dynamics. Whether it's the midtempo acoustic ballads ("Brendan's Death Song"), the midtempo piano masher ("Happiness Loves Company"), or the midtempo rockers (nearly everything else), they're all equally loud and flat. As a result, the sequencing of the 14 tracks feels arbitrary, the hour-long runtime intentionally superfluous: It feels as if even they don't think anyone will play this in its intended order after the first listen.
As far as arena-dominating radio rock goes, you could do worse: Even as they soften in old age, the Peppers can still remind you that a lot of people discovered Gang of Four, the Minutemen, and George Clinton through them. And occasionally, the punk-funk still rings true: I'd love to see an intrepid mashup junkie lay Luke Jenner's vocals from In the Grace of Your Love over these instrumentals and vice versa. After all, Flea sounded great in Thom Yorke's Atoms For Peace project while actually playing more slap-bass than he does here, and we learned from John Frusciante's troubled but occasionally fascinating solo albums that these guys would probably be far more interesting outside the scope of their main gig. Until then, I'm With You's hip thrusts and gyrations simply go through the motions, the work of a band with all kinds of capital to blow but no incentive to do anything differently. After all, it's a Red Hot Chili Peppers album.
