3 Aug 2019

John Frusciante - Inside of Emptiness (2004)


1) What I Saw; 2) The World's Edge; 3) Inside a Break; 4) A Firm Kick; 5) Look On; 6) Emptiness; 7) I'm Around; 8) 666; 9) Interior Two; 10) Scratches

Loud guitars. There's more to it than that, but wish there was also more of things to truly cherish.


Key tracks: "What I Saw", "A Firm Kick", "Look On"

Inside of Emptiness begins with a sturdy riff and a steady beat, and with those two sounds it pinpoints where the focus is on this time. Frusciante albums always (or at least around this point) have a heavy emphasis on guitar as a lead instrument for obvious reasons, but there's emphasis and then there's putting it as the key focus of the arrangements as is done here. The first instinct is to call Inside of Emptiness Frusciante's rock-out guitar album but it'd be more accurate to describe it as the guitar-and-drums record: Josh Klinghoffer has been a constant companion for Frusciante throughout his 2004 recordings but here his drumming gets an equal spotlight in the mix to Frusciante's guitars. You get the impression the origin of these songs was the two J's bashing out songs with their chosen lead instruments before fleshing out the rest much later; you could strip down the songs here to just those two instruments and only in a couple of cases would you lose anything integral to the arrangements.

In general Inside of Emptiness is still clearly within the realm of Frusciante's other 2004 albums, so much of the same sonical elements apply. The more melodic approach to songwriting is still there, the production is cut from the same cloth as the rest of the albums and it's still got the same no-frills approach where sparseness is a key value. Where it stands out is that here it's Frusciante fully leaning on the muscular side of his playing after hinting at hit periodically in the prior albums, where style in the past has been to reserve his unleashed rock and roll guitar moments for particularly climactic moments in chosen songs, now each guitar riff is played out like the intense last section of a song.  and it results in the kind of album that benefits from cranking the volume high. It's the opposite of an oasis among its largely calmer counterparts during the 2004 wave of records.


The big, obvious explosive moments, such as the opener "What I Saw" and the late-album powerhouse "666" jump out as the most defining moments of Inside of Emptiness. These are full of sound wall riffs and loud cymbal-heavy breakdowns, and are what you'd imagine when you think about Frusciante doing a rock-heavy album. "666" even features a curveball demonic scream from Frusciante, amidst its borderline-headbanging riffs courtesy of the album's sole guest spot Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Not all them are as confrontational: "Look On" is a classic centrepiece anthem with an above-average length of which half is spent on a seemingly everlasting coda, and it's far calmer than the other two songs addressed before. Still with its high-in-mix riffs and multiple stand-out solos as well as lead guitar parts which might as well be solos, it's just as much of a rock beast as the other two. In general, these are the songs that will leave the initial strongest impression - the ones you carry away from the album in the first place because they take such a break from Frusciante's usual albums. They're arguably the album's highlights too, with "What I Saw" especially not just being a great intro to the album but a cavalcade of great hooks in general, and because I'm a sucker for a good extended finale "Look On" is probably my favourite of the lot here and one of the album's standout songs to begin with.

Despite how dominating the hard rockers are in leaving the most lasting impression, they're not actually that characteristic of the full tracklist. There's a handful of slow-burners that are similarly amplified in volume but release it in careful bursts rather than drenching in guitars throughout: "Inside a Break" and "Emptiness" build up a careful momentum coiling up the tension before uncurling into a series of sharp, powerful bursts of sound, and they keep you on your toes nicely. There's also a number of gentler moments that bridge the gap between Inside of Emptiness and the rest of Frusciante's 2004 albums, and while the contrast between, say, "I'm Around" and the melancholy closer "Scratches" with the rest of the album is so wide, they end up forming a natural part of its ebbs and flows. "A Firm Kick" is even one of the best songs on the album: its graceful vulnerability is a flashback to The Will to Death, with its fantastic backing vocal parts and accentuating keyboard arrangement. Between it, the thrashing of "666" and the whiplashingly perky and jolly "Interior Two" Inside of Emptiness covers a surprising lot of ground; it's not just the big rock album it makes itself out to be at first.

It's quite fun to hear Frusciante just kick the energy into overdrive and play the rock hero in his solo records for once in a while, so it's actually a little bit of a shame that the album stretches its territory so much. When it starts stepping on the stylistic lines of other Frusciante albums, it also becomes clear that the songs are on a slightly lesser tier. There are no straight-up weak cuts here, but only "Look On" at most has a chance to stand up among the general highlights of the 00's Frusciante records. It's an album that's great when it's on but whenever it's not, it ends up a little forgotten; one where the songs are good but not so great they'd jump to surface. Discounting Automatic Writing (a side project) and DC EP (an EP), out of the mid-00's group of Frusciante albums this is the weakest one - or least good, however you want to phrase it - and where the others have highlighted the various sides of Frusciante's songwriting one by one, Inside of Emptiness only gets about halfway there. For the supposed riff album it's not as excitingly loud as it could be and if you're in the mood for a more nuanced Frusciante album, there's a lot more of those that do it better. This has always been somewhat buried under the other albums of this era, and I don't mean to dismiss it because I do enjoy it, but the years since have somewhat highlighted where it's lacking and there's some solid ground behind why this seems to be the least mentioned album of the lot.

Rating: 7/10

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