Besides being an excellent guitarist and a famously recovered heroin addict, John Frusciante isn't quite as easy to categorise as you'd expect. His return to the ranks of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the late '90s stimulated the most focused, cohesive and memorable music of their erratic career. But while he inspired his band to new commercial heights, his solo albums have, paradoxically, been defiantly unmarketable: scratchy, lo-fi confessions as experimental as the Chilis are accessible.
"Shadows Collide With People", his fourth, initially seems to continue down that path, beginning with gurgling ambience. Soon enough, though, that first song – "Carvel" – explodes into big, energetically strummed Californian pop in the vein of the Chilis, albeit drained of their funk. This, it transpires, is the model for the album: mainstream, bleeding-heart balladry (featuring all the Chilis save Anthony Kiedis), tempered by slightly outre arrangements. So analogue synths and mellotrons wheeze away in the corners of songs, and when things become a little too bland – on the Richard Ashcroft-ish blub of "Regret", say – Frusciante applies distortion and effects trickery to his voice.
It's a nice enough album, one that feels as if he's trying to unite the two disparate strands of his career. Still, you can't help feeling that they were better kept separate. There's nothing here as immediately satisfying as "By The Way", for instance, even if the charming "Song To Sing When I'm Lonely" runs it fairly close. The best moments are when Frusciante recaptures the leftfield imperative, puts his guitar down, and forgets his day job: the jarring, overlapping musique concrète of "Negative 00 Ghost 27"; the wobbling synth ritual of "Failure 33 Object", vaguely reminiscent of '70s Krautrockers Cluster. Abstract noise becomes the solo Frusciante. The Chili Peppers are welcome to the anthems.
