Anthony Kiedis has had enough of your jokes, jeers, and general bullshit–and can you blame him? 30-odd years after his band formed, the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman can’t catch a break. While we’re all sitting on our asses, cracking jokes about his hospitalization and his best friend’s rendition of the National Anthem, he and his pals are out there hustling—spreading love and #posivibes to stadiums worldwide, rescuing babies while doing Carpool karaoke with his bandmates, and getting inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Music isn’t a game to him–neither are carefully-placed tube socks. Appropriately, then, the Peppers’ first single from their eleventh album The Getaway, “Dark Necessities,” is no cheerful comeback celebration–in fact, it’s downright confrontational. “You don’t know my mind,” he sneers on the chorus, “You don’t know my kind.” Fueled by this self-awareness (subservient to a broader desire to shush the haters), the Peppers have come to set the record straight. (Take that, Mike Patton.)
Like* 2011's I’m With You, ____The Getaway* marks a changing-of-hands in the Peppers camp: it’s their first album since 1989’s Mothers’ Milk without Rick Rubin behind the boards. While the producer's absence hasn’t stirred up the same anxiety among acolytes as John Frusciante did when he left the group at the end of the '00s, its significance can’t be understated. Sure, Frusciante's guitarist’s showy solos and funk prowess certainly played foundational roles in the Peppers' halcyon days, but as far as arrangements, engineering, sequencing, and overall sound were concerned, Rubin deserves equal credit for crafting the sonic blueprint that turned four horny goofballs from Los Angeles into kings of the global stadium circuit: crisp, crunchy, crass–and immediate.
Rubin's playbook has blessed the Peppers with a quarter-century of successful chart showings and tours, but it’s also left them sock-deep in a creative quagmire for the past several LPs, dragged down by blaring, untextured mixes and a fatal lack of boundaries in matters of alpha-male kabuki. Good thing they picked the right duo to help them clamber out of the pit on The Getaway: pop-smith extraordinaire Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton produced the record and co-wrote five of its tracks, with longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich handling the mixing. If Rubin's uniform racket is engineered to tickle the reptile brain, then Burton’s approach to rock production–best illustrated by his recurring collaborations with the Black Keys–seeks to unite a divided audience through commonalities, developing frisson through the simultaneous overlaps and juxtapositions between genres, textures, and patches of negative space.
Unsurprisingly, The Getaway easily stands as the Peppers’ lushest album to date, a welcome reprieve from 25 years of cramped, inert, (and in the case of Californication, occasionally unlistenable) mixes. While their sonic tropes haven’t changed–what would a Red Hot Chili Peppers album be without Flea’s slappy solos, Kiedis’ staccato raps, or full-band funk breakdowns?–Burton's foggy, psychedelic palette marks a drastic shift in the presentation of those motifs, widening the gulf between the band's funk-metal past and their hang-loose, jam-band present. The producer’s usual cinematic flourishes (fervent strings, accentuated flange, melancholy keys) reveal his influence immediately, and occasionally excessively; The inert trip-hop arrangements showcased on “Feasting on the Flowers” and “The Hunter” (both co-written by Burton) could have come from the cutting-room floor after one of his Broken Bells sessions, while closing track “Dreams of a Samurai” suffers from a severe case of atmospheric bloat.
The Getaway proves far more successful when Burton steps back and lets the band funk around (with a little extra supervision, of course). Employing an organic approach similar to his winning strategy on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Godrich staggers the tracks so the band's grooves can breathe–and more importantly, so their instrumental prowess can be put to use for a change: especially the talents of guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who joined the band after Frusciante’s departure. Whereas I’m With You delegated the axeman to a textural supporting role, The Getaway casts the newest Pepper as a proper successor to Frusciante, ramping up his duties as a soloist and backup vocalist. Klinghoffer's yet to surpass his mentor's technical skill and overall gravitas, but between Kiedis’ puff-chested posturing and Flea and Smith's explosive percussive dynamics, the guitarist's restraint provides a much-needed anchor.
By now, Peppers fans know better than to expect Pulitzer-worthy poetry from a goofy bard like Kiedis: his rapping continues to function primarily as a vocal extension of his bandmates' rhythm section, rather than a thematic vehicle (unless there’s some hidden metaphorical genius embedded in couplets like “Up to my ass in alligators/Let’s get it on with the alligator haters”; I’m certainly amenable to enlightenment). Considering how the Peppers’ hopes of escaping their comfort zone led them to Burton and Godrich in the first place, the album’s lyrical stasis scans as disappointing, if unsurprising. Less than two minutes into the album, Kiedis gives his first shoutout to Call-ee-phon-ya; from there, the perfunctory Golden State worship quickly plummets into The Californians territory. "Driving down Calexico highway,” he croons on “Encore,” “and now I know the signs for sure.” Stuart, is that you? At least he delves into some other topics, including sex with robots (from the silvery highlight “Go Robot:” “You’ve got to choose it to use it so let me plug it in/Robots are my next of kin”) and Brazilians ("I met a girl with long black hair and she opened up so wide,” he boasts on “This Ticonderoga”), Iggy Pop & J Dilla (on a song called–what else?–“Detroit”), and worst of all, a dance Kiedis calls “The Avocado.” He even proffers up a few life lessons, including the following nugget of wisdom: "We are all just soldiers in this battlefield of life.”
Were it not for these issues and the B-Side's proliferation of yawn-inducing, stoned slow jams, The Getaway could have potentially bested By The Way as the Peppers’ best work post-Californication. By tapping into what made the Peppers Rock Hall-worthy–their instrumental potency, their extensive knowledge of funk, their willingness to laugh at themselves (to a point)–Burton and Godrich have gracefully, gently steered the band back on the right track. At the very least, this surprisingly complex album lends credence to Kiedis’ accusations. Maybe we don't know his mind, or his kind–or at least not quite like we thought.
