John Frusciante - PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone (2012)

1) Intro/Sabam; 2) Hear Say; 3) Bike; 4) Ratiug; 5) Guitar; 6) Mistakes; 7) Uprane; 8) Sam; 9) Sum

Frusciante restarts from scratch with an electronic reinvention, and somewhat appropriately sounds like a newcomer again rather than a seasoned veteran. In a somewhat awkward way.

Key tracks: "Ratiug", "Mistakes"

John Frusciante may be a master of his art when it comes to his guitar but that does not automatically translate to being adept at everything. After leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers for the second time and burning out from being a rock star, he found a new passion in samplers and music programmers. Frusciante had dabbled with electronic elements before - the programmed loops around the To Record Only Water for Ten Days era, A Sphere in the Heart of Silence – but now it was about a full re-invention of himself as a musician and carving a completely new path onwards. Not a bad thing on its own and PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone (jesus) was released relatively shortly after Frusciante’s retirement and subsequent electronic obsession, a sign that he was still an active creator and had no interest in retiring. Trouble is, the album is also worrisomely close to someone’s first attempts at sampling, looping and programming. Something’s gone awry when parts of an album from a world-famous, seasoned music veteran sounds eerily close to the hapless things I used to make with Fruity Loops and CuBase back when I was trying to make sense of them.

PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone’s big downside is how it actively sabotages itself in the name of Frusciante’s ambitious rebirth. It’s not actually a bad album when you listen to the core of the songs and the actual writing itself, as Frusciante’s still got the know-how of writing a great, evocative musical segment. Unfortunately here they’ve been pushed through a cheap, disjointed electronic production where songs transition from one part to another abruptly like a haphazard cut/paste job and where everything is drowned by (what sounds like) pre-set drum sample loops. The drums are pretty easily the main offender, in fact: they sound cheap, the loops have a habit of changing disjointedly and hyperactively in a way that throws the song off the rails and Frusciante’s apparent keenness on chaotic fills is a constant disruption throughout the album. It’s all very Fisher Price My First Electronic Album, or at the very least like archive material from the very first messing about you do when you get a new plaything. Yet, not only is this a fully-fledged release but also the supposedly more structured and planned album after the directly preceding Letur-Lefr EP collected together some of the initial experimental material. Not that you’d be able to tell.

Endure through the haphazard production and you get some good stuff, mostly in the form of scattershot segments throughout the album that manage to shine through the awkward surface and disjointedness of the tracks they’re attached to. Only the appropriately guitar-centric “Ratiug” and bouncy “Mistakes” feel like fully-formed songs on their own right, with a structure that feels natural and consistency across all the elements. The former even finishes off with a rap verse from Kinetic 9, which is somewhat out of nowhere given Frusciante’s back catalogue and yet feels more integrated to the song than some of the drum fills elsewhere on the album. The good parts elsewhere take a lot more work to unearth and understand, requiring patience and a concentrated listen, but there’s enough there to keep the album afloat and occasionally even pretty good: the most notable examples are “Hear Say” and “Bike” which are theoretical album highlights screaming for some coherency. Had these been produced more professionally, we might even be talking about a really good album.

The thing is, I’m all for Frusciante growing his repertoire and have no qualms about him relegating the guitar to a side role (it’s still heavily present here but used for background textures more than anything), but it does come with the expectation that he would still reach his previous standards. Instead, it fails to realise the “progressive synth-pop” concept Frusciante described the album as, and that’s all to do with how the album sounds like he’s still in the middle of learning his new tools. For an artist’s ninth album PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone is almost embarrassingly amateurish. The first album of Frusciante’s artistic rebirth is, rather appropriately, like an awkward debut.

Rating: 5/10