By 2004 Frusciante reached his musical peak, but it certainly wasn't the end of the road. Years after rehab and dental surgery Frusicante was ganing confidence in his talents and of all albums, Shadows Collide with People was the one that gave recognition of his songwriting talents, briefly glimpsed at in previous records. The flurry of guitar chords and electronic stratching in "Carvel" builds up to reveal Frusciante's voice has drastically improved since Niandres. The man hits high and low notes with ease, growls and roars the lyrics and is complimented by a high scaling pop sound. If I had one word to describe this album it would be "healthy". Frusciante is still concerned with his own journey and his climb back into normality, but the album gives us a sense he already climbed that steep slope. Shadows is a deeply honest, profound yet beautifully mellow record from a man who has been given a second chance for life.
Despite the success of Shadows, it was an incredibly costly and time consuming album to produce. Frusciante then decided he would go against the grain of pop album recording to write, produce and perform on six consecutive albums over six months. the idea would be that he would create a sound that was raw, minimal and spontaneous. The Will to Death was the first of these six albums and personally a very high scorer in my books. Unlike Shadows every song is stripped down to it's fundamental core. No backing vocals, no layering of sounds.Just Frusciante and his friend Josh Klingoffer performing on a maximum of two takes for each song. The nakedness of the album gives a strange ethereal quality to every song, the lack of 'noise' means Frusciante's voice is shown to have matured and developed so much that it could carry the whole album by itself, and indeed listening to the vocals through one ear phone proves my theory. The short, slightly angsty "The Loop" is the birthplace of Frusciante's strange and paradoxical lyrics enterwined with built up vocals and guitar. Somehow it works. My favourite song of all of Frusciante's back catalogue is on this album, "The Days Have Turned." Turn it up high on your headphones at 2 in the morning and you might just get a glimpse of the quiet yet beautiful melancholia of the song.
Skipping the Ataxia albums (Frusciante and Klingoffer's sporadic band) we reach Inside of Emptiness released in October of the same year. Frusciante's sound hasn't changed much from The Will to Death, even the album is packaged in the same textured cardboard and eerie front cover. The album lacks the entertainment factor of Shadows and the innovation behind The Will to Death but each song has its own uniqueness and style. "A Firm Kick" is a pivotal song on the track list. It begins as a simple acoustic song, focused on his past regrets and misgivings (as many Froo tracks on the album do) but halfway in appears some poignant lyrics doubled with a beautiful electronic messy noise.
"I will play some light from the sun
The world by my side
I will see down as a forlorn maiden in the sky
And I will play a song of thunder you may recognize
You make a never
Thats forever
Knowing what you deny."
Frusicante has that special talent of making his music accessible and dare I say it, comforting in a way an audience can understand emotionally, but not figuratively. His lyrics are vague and whimsical, by not saying a lot, they somehow paint a masterpiece in the mind's eye.A Firm Kick is like a static white staircase ascending into the clouds then crashing down suddenly at your feet. It's a peculiar, mesmerising album, definitely worth a number of listens.
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