1) The Past Recedes; 2) Lever Pulled; 3) Anne; 4) The Real; 5) A Name; 6) Control; 7) Your Warning; 8) Hope; 9) Ascension; 10) Time Tonight; 11) Leap Your Bar
Somber and sparse introspection centered around an acoustic guitar and a heavy voice. Frusciante at his most intimate, but no less carefully arranged.
Key tracks: "The Past Recedes", "Lever Pulled", "Ascension"
It got delayed by a month but Curtains still managed to hit its target window, and with its release John Frusciante completed his absolutely bonkers decision to shove out as many albums as he could within 12 months, most of them within the last half of it (or the last half plus one month, given the delay). You could have possibly expected the last of the lot to be some kind of culminating triumph of a victory lap, but Curtains is anything but. It's the quietest and most delicate of the bunch, intentionally focused on Frusciante and either an acoustic guitar or a piano with select few accompaniments to go with them. Where much of the 2004 collection was clearly coloured by the people Frusciante collaborated with, on Curtains it's largely just about just the man himself, with the few collaborators undisturbingly doing their work in the background.
It's somewhat inevitable for albums like this to have a certain kind of emotional gravitas, and much of Curtains is, as expected, world-weary and melancholy. That kind of weight comes to Frusciante naturally, given his life experience and the struggles he's by this point left behind but never forgotten. Curtains weighs heavy with somber introspection, cut with a hint of the relief that he survived through everything he went through - it brings to the front what's always been coursing behind the lines and melodies in the previous albums. Frusciante puts it well himself in "The Past Recedes", bluntly defining much of his 00s mindset: "to be here you first got to die / so I gave it a try / and what do you know / time was so long ago". But the person who sings those lines isn't a haunted man, it's a gentle voice full of warmth and hope. Curtains is sad album but it's interpreted by someone who's found peace from his ghosts, and its overall feel is more meditative. Somber, but not bleak.
"The Past Recedes" is a gorgeous song: it's also very lush and meticulously arranged, full of layered guitars, backing vocal harmonies and other elements that make it sound orchestrated despite largely just featuring Frusciante on his own. Curtains does this a lot, where it uses the sparse building blocks of each song with powerful intent, so that every time something beyond an acoustic guitar appears it feels monumental, and something as gently crashing as the sudden choruses of "Control" - which throw a great contrast to its fade-in/out verses - feel bold and explosive as a result. The contrasts are so stark that when "Ascension" brings out simple keyboard texture to back Frusciante, it comes across like a stylistic whiplash and the equivalent of sticking an electronic song in a rock album. Songs where things are actually stripped down to the very basics, like how you'd expect from the typical Acoustic Album, are relatively few and far between. The change in approach shows particularly clearly when the full band does come out to play and Frusciante grabs onto his electric guitar - the excellent early album trilogy "Lever Pulled" / "Anne" / "A Name" is like a direct bridge to the earlier albums (most notably The Will to Death) but all the instruments are clearly playing back fiddle to the man in front, gently making their presence known in a cool and controlled fashion - each one treated with the same gentleness as the acoustic.
Even when there aren't any other instruments, Frusciante turns his own voice into one. Rich background vocals aren't an anomaly in his body of work but due to the sparseness of Curtains, their constant presence here is highlighted even further and frequently underline the emotional centerpoints of each song. Similarly, when there's nothing else to steal your attention away it's the voice that gets you, and so a lot of Curtains' most memorable moments come directly from Frusciante himself. Sometimes it's particularly overt: "Ascension" is a showstopper parade of killer vocal hooks in all forms (lead melody, wordless hook, background harmonies, you name it), "Your Warning" becomes the album's big tearjerker song through Frusciante's fragile falsetto sinking into his own loneliness towards the song's end in an utterly heartbreaking and memorable way, and the piano arrangement of "Leap Your Bar" is so skeletal that it's Frusciante's vocal delivery that literally makes the song. When I think back on Curtains without listening to it, it's the vocals that I remember the clearest - they effectively determine each song's general mood regardless of the musical or lyrical content, driving the rest of the composition, and it's the little inflections and details in how Frusciante sings that become the sticking points. Curtains isn't where Frusciante shows off his pipes the loudest and it's instead rather restrained throughout in that department; but it's the album where out of any of his albums he really hammers down the emotional weight his voice has.
Frusciante's overall winning streak throughout this period continues on Curtains, even if out of the albums released under his name it's the least song-y: one not defined by its big songs but rather intended to be taken in as a whole, ideally played in a setting that suits its low-key tones. Or in other words, it's the album that suffers the most if the songs are removed from their context due to the very nature of how subtle they are, gorgeous as they may be; some of Frusciante's most tender work and most beautiful moments can be found concentrated here. His music has always been very personally direct and that's one of his solo material's main appeals - Curtains is that at its most intimate level.
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