Me and My Friends #25 - I Do Feel Maya
This band has little occurences -- factoids, riddles, situations -- that tickle the mind to think about. The kind of thing you'd reject for being too bizarre if it happened in a movie or a book.
For example: Josh Klinghoffer, being born in 1979, is the youngest person to play guitar for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Up until December 2019, he was also the oldest, at 40, to ever play live with the band. The previous oldest was John, at 37, back in 2007. But Josh is not the youngest person to ever play guitar for the band. That was John, in 1988, as an eighteen year old. But Josh leaving the band means John, having returned, is now once again the oldest - at 50 - to play live with them. And of course, Blackbyrd McKnight, at 66, is the oldest man to ever play guitar for the band. But, so, to think about it, Josh is the youngest, but not the youngest ever, and he used to be oldest, but now he's not, because the youngest person to play live with the band is back, and is now the oldest.
Still with me? Good.
Another one. Think about "Behind the Sun" -- when 17 year old John Frusciante went to Tower Records in 1987 and bought a copy of The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, he would have gone home and heard that song, and maybe enjoyed it a great deal. Do you think it would have ever occured to him that there would one day be a video clip for that song featuring him, put together after he had joined the band, propelled them to worldwide fame, and then quit? I'm going to say that that would be highly unlikely.
Something closer to the current period. If John Frusciante hadn't returned to the band in December 2019, there's a very high chance we'd have a new album with Josh by now -- COVID-affected recording sessions or not. They were well into the writing stages of a new album before the lineup change. Weird to think about, isn't it? They wouldn't have been able to tour it, so we'd probably have a bunch of in-studio performances (or not), a video clip filmed at safe social distances, and a bunch of bizarre frozen in time, Zoom-based press. Or maybe they'd have postponed it entirely. My point is -- they'd be much further along in the timeline than they are now, and the whole RHCP-world would be different, in many ways. Instead of silence, there'd be... well, the opposite of silence. The same way things would be very different if some small change had or hadn't happened somewhere along the line over the past forty years.
And so while the Chili Peppers might be in an enforced period of stillness now, it's quite odd, as well, that we're still able to hear from the two men that are the primary reason for that stillness. It's quite odd that after all of the cataclysmic changes over the past year, these two men -- so closely tied together, but so separate in many ways -- each have an album out within a week of each other.
And what different albums they are.
I Don't Feel Well has been out for a few days, and I think it's a wonderful album for a number of reasons. It reminds me of Radiohead quite often; "Rat Bastards At Every Turn" on To Be One With You sounded to me like it was inspired by Radiohead's "Sit Down, Stand Up", and it seems like those influences have developed further in recent months (this is a good thing, I should say).
Josh seems more vocally confident here too. Sometimes it really does sound like he's singing through a mouth full of marbles, and that occasionally grated on me, so it's nice to see those wrinkles ironed out. Hell, he even kinda raps on "The Night Won't Scare Me".
Another key aspect is the -- to me -- very heavy role the piano seems to have taken in his writing process this time around. The guitar feels less present in this collection of songs than in any Klinghoffer project so far. Every song sounds like it was started and fleshed out on the piano we see in all of his recent "live" performances; there's a sense that the piano / drum / bass permeates it all, as opposed to the piano being something to flesh out what the guitar had started.
And maybe that makes sense, if we consider what's happened over the past year. Has Josh dealt with his removal from the guitar playing position in the Chili Peppers by seeking out a different instrument entirely? Or is this just a coincidence, something that would have happened anyway? I suppose only Josh knows that, if he's thought about it at all. But it's exciting to see where he might take it in the future - on the next Pluralone (or Dot Hacker?) album.
Could the man who wrote the opening riff to "The Longest Wave" slip further and further away from that instrument? Speaking of slipping away from the guitar...
Thanks to the wonderful people over at Planet Mu and Timesig, I've been able to spend a lot of time with John's new album Maya over the past month. And I think I'm pretty comfortable calling it my favourite release of his since The Empyrean.
If I'm honest, I didn't enjoy anything from Letur-Lefr, PBX, Outsides or Enclosure, or any of the Black Knights releases. I appreciated what he was trying to do, but I didn't think he was doing it all that well. In fact, it provided a strange kind of ammunition to any detractors that Josh might have faced during his time in the band: "You want John back? Have you... heard the music John's making?"
If I had to pick between I'm With You or "Sect In Sgt", I knew where my loyalties would lie. It was a relief when the Trickfinger releases came out in 2015 and 2017 -- ironically, they were recorded almost a decade earlier -- but it turns out when he was just doing straight acid house, it was a lot more palatable. At least to me. It's when he tried to combine his older method of song-writing with the erratic synth and drum work that left me feeling cold.
But Maya feels like the culmination of everything he seemed to be working towards over the previous decade -- rhythmic progression, even within the context of 90's jungle; a move away from "traditional" melodies into something more complex; density that needs to be lived with for a few weeks in order to truly appreciate and dig into -- and he's finally cracked the code. Whatever switch was flicked over the last couple of years in his life (I'm obviously not the only one who's noticed this) has seemingly affected the music that he's been making, and clearly we're all going to benefit.
This feels a bit like it's 2004 again, when John released a "rock" album, and an "electronic" album, and an "acoustic" album in successive months. This is his "jungle" album -- who knows if it's going to be the start of a string of them, but judging from his other Trickfinger releases put out this year, recorded after Maya, it seems like he's moving back into more of a... rock-inspired sound? Especially "Meaning To" on Look Down, See Us.
Maya is in an "old-fashioned" style, sure, but he injects enough of the melody into it -- a talent he's spent his life honing -- so it sounds quite different than your average 90's club banger. "Brand E" starts off with that wonderful almost-melancholic synth melody, and that sampled voice -- "Gimme a motherfucking breakbeat!" comes in, and hot damn if that doesn't set you off nicely for the next 41 minutes. A technique he uses that I love: different beats in differing speakers that somehow merge into one. Like two drummers playing the same part; it's impossible to play exactly in sync, so that flange effect thickens everything up.
The only song that falls short, for me, is "Pleasure Explanation". That stumbling refusal to commit to an actual beat reminds me of his 2011-2015 era work a little too much, and I always wind up wanting to skip it.
And if you're new to jungle as a whole, I'd recommend an album I actually discovered thanks to a recommendation from, oddly enough, Anthony Kiedis, back in some magazine article in about 2007. It's by John's friend Venetian Snares (whose label, Timesig, is putting Maya out), and it's called Rossz Csillag Allatt Született. The brief for the album is, basically, what if jungle + classical string samples? This song, probably the best on the album, samples Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday", and somehow makes a sad song seem even more desolate.
It's an incredible piece of work that sounds futuristic and ahead of its time, but also like it might have been unearthed in some old Hungarian record store on a rainy winter afternoon. You can dance to it, but it also permeates death. Unique and lovely.
Anyway, Maya is out on Friday, October 23, and you're obviously going to listen to it if you're subscribed to this newsletter, but if John's recent electronic work doesn't interest you -- which I totally understand -- I would still highly recommend going into Maya with an open mind and an open heart. It might just open wonderful new avenues for you.
And if you still don't like it, another guitar player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers also released a solo album this week.
Isn't it lovely being spoiled for choice? :-)