John Frusciante - Smile from the Streets You Hold (1997)

1) Enter a Uh; 2) The Other; 3) Life’s a Bath; 4) A Fall Thru the Ground; 5) Poppy Man; 6) I May Again Know John; 7) I’m Always; 8) N------ Song; 9) Feminity; 10) Breathe; 11) More; 12) For Air; 13) Height Down; 14) Well, I’ve Been; 15) Smile from the Streets You Hold; 16) I Can’t See Until I See Your Eyes; 17) Estress

The pained ramblings of a tortured soul. If you think there's artistry here then, well, you're a better man than I am.

 

Key tracks: Uhhh... "A Fall Thru the Ground".

Frusciante’s 90s drug problems really take the wheel here. Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt still had some artistic thought behind it but Frusciante has openly admitted that Smile from the Streets You Hold was released solely to get drug money. You can tell - you can hear he is not in a good shape here. Physically he was little more than a skeleton with rotting teeth, his voice is completely shot and there’s little coherent musical thought in the sparse guitar sketches here. Where there’s a tune, it rarely takes shape: between the lo-fi recording quality, the quick seemingly one-take attempts and Frusciante’s clouded state of mind, even the best parts of the album sound like they were meant to be quickly discarded.

The element that makes Smile from the Streets You Hold an even harder thing to get through is that parts of it are genuinely painful to listen to. Messy songs are one thing - Niandra Lades had plenty of that and I could survive through that fine, even it it’s not a good album in the slightest. Frusciante on death’s door is another matter. He sounds genuinely deteriorated here and often barely hanging there. This is at its worst in “Enter a Uh” (which is the first thing you’ll hear!): over the course of its eight minutes it slowly disintegrates into a chaotic swirl of off-notes and tortured shrieks, sounding like a cry for help or a warning sign (whichever way you want to take it) than a piece of music anyone actually wanted to make. It’s a horrible song and that’s mainly because you can hear Frusciante’s pain through it, and there’s no amount of romanticism of a pained artist in the world to make it anything more than tragic to listen to.

That’s Smile from the Streets You Hold at its worst. At its best it offers barely passable ideas. A handful of songs such as “Feminity”, “More” and “Estress” bear marks of Frusciante’s more familiar songwriting style but ripped apart and distorted into little more than brief moments of unmemorable but relieving shades of light among the rest of the album. “A Fall Thru the Ground” is by and far the best song here, and coincidentally (or not) sounds like the most fully realised of the lot: with added instrumentation beyond Frusciante’s guitar, a sense of progression and abnormal clarity, it sounds like it comes from a wholly different mindset and place than rest of the album. It’s not a good song, but it’s the best you get here. And beyond its best parts, Smile alternates between dull rambles that go nowhere and painful snapshots of a suffering musician. It’s not an album that has much musical value to give, and there’s only so many vaguely formed lo-fi strums you can deal with in a row before it goes from novel to tedious. Basically you’ll be listening to this for the experience rather than for its songwriting, a fact that never gets any more enjoyable the longer the album runs for.

The experience isn’t really one to go for either, though. Someone stronger than myself could potentially find some artistic merit in hearing music like this where you can really feel a musician pour his life into the songs, regardless of whether the songs were actually good or not. I personally can’t with this album, because the life in question is too frail and clearly in too much pain. Judging just the music on its own it’s clearly not a good listen anyway, but what makes Smile something that I actively want to turn off is the air around it and the way it’s performed. It’s a struggle to finish, and to start to begin with if we’re honest, because it’s got too much authentic suffering embedded into its fragmented guitar chaos. I wouldn’t hesitate to call this the worst album in my collection because it’s actively repelling, and yet it feels wrong to state that because it’s so clear Frusciante wasn’t aiming for anything with this either, beyond just having something to get more cash with.

If there’s something to this, it’s hearing just how deep Frusciante went before his recovery - his post-drug releases sound downright miraculous once you have this to compare them with.

Rating: 2/10