Anthony Kiedis is at the county fair. He’s in your lane. He’s in Baton Rouge, listening to Raw Power. The Red Hot Chili Peppers singer is everywhere at once on Return of the Dream Canteen, but he often sounds like he’d rather be at home, in the quiet, deep in his memories. Like April’s Unlimited Love—and so much of their discography—Dream Canteen is overlong, generous in spirit, inconsistent in execution, and puffed up with fraternal charm. What it lacks is harder to define, though its absence is immediately apparent. Even at their most poignant, the quartet have always sounded like a band drawing inhuman amounts of energy from the world around them. Maybe it’s the three years they spent off the road, maybe it’s the fact that the world doesn’t have much to offer a band so reliant on goofball vapor right now, but for perhaps the first time in their career, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, undefeated in their hearts, sound spooked by life’s long, slow fade.
While the sense of time’s encroachment makes Dream Canteen one of the most theoretically interesting albums in their catalog, it also makes it less compelling than the melancholy highs they brushed on 1999’s Californication and 1995’s underrated One Hot Minute. This is an album that feels like it’s wrapped up in June gloom, even when it’s trying to tell you it’s in a great mood. Those gray L.A. mornings give way to glorious afternoons, but when the fog burns off halfway through the album, Dream Canteen reveals itself as a subdued, surprisingly inward-facing album. It’s as if the fresh start with guitarist John Frusciante, who rejoined the band for a third go-round in 2019, has also prompted a new examination of all the things in life that haven’t been restored. Accordingly, Dream Canteen is populated with forgotten actors, classic bands, and, most tellingly, many lyrical and musical references to decades-old Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. Oftentimes, this most kinetic of bands sounds like they’re sitting down. They sound like they’re wearing shirts.
Whether this works or not is largely dependent on what you expect from the second Red Hot Chili Peppers double album of 2022. Dream Canteen’s 17 songs were recorded in the same sessions as Unlimited Love, and like those tracks, they suffer from the tidiness of Rick Rubin’s production. He keeps the four Peps sealed off from one another at a time when they should sound closer than ever; you could stroll in the space between Frusciante’s guitar and Flea’s bass in “Fake as Fu@k.” Many of the songs on the first half feel like valedictory takes on the band’s earlier styles: See the Mother’s Milk-era “ya-yas” with which Kiedis marks his arrival in “Tippa My Tongue,” a song whose opening drumroll and rolling bassline recall the intro to 2002’s “Can’t Stop.” The latter song pops up again in “Peace and Love,” whose chorus seems to have been written on top of the By the Way single’s.