Chilli's guitarist Jon Frusciante releases eleventh solo album Enclosure

Enclosure was written, produced, performed and engineered by Frusciante in his Los Angeles-based recording studio. Does this multi-talented rocker live up to the hype?

Frusciante wanted to make an album that was the accumulation of all his musical goals. And so Enclosure was born. Warning: although I hate RHCP, I think Flea is one of the greatest bassist and I have an open mind about all music.

The opening track Shining Desert is whiny, dull and unimaginative. I don’t know what this song is about, what it’s trying to do and I don’t even know what genre it is… Perhaps here lies its genius?

Sleep is a very confused track. It's dated electro with alternative (and basic) piano with Frusciante’s dad rock vocals. I'm not entirely sure what this song is about and it’s actually quite painful to listen to.

Third track, Run, follows much the same formula as its two predecessors. And it’s doing nothing to shift my opinion of the album.

Stage is the forth track of album and it’s now that I realise that most the track titles are monosyllabic. This is more drum 'n' bass, but coupled with Daft Punk electro and his unique/dated vocals and a rock guitar solo, it’s all a bit schizophrenic.

Then we head to Fanfare, track five on the album and we’re transported to a very bad New Romantic club in Dulwich. If Tony Hadley was dead, he’d be turning in his grave.

Cinch is an instrumental which sounds like it’s trying to borrow from Mogwai, but with pitiful results. It sounds like a bad 80s computer game or a track that was rejected from the original Tron soundtrack.

Zone follows on seamlessly from Cinch, but this time with more caterwauling from Frusciante.

Penultimate track, Crowded, sounds like it’s from some low-budget, European horror movie but with drums completely over-powering the track.

The finale of the album, the crowning glory, the cherry on the cake, called Excuses, was a pitiful excuse for an electro track. I could do better with this on my 90s Casio keyboard. He’s added some strings, but this fleeting addition to the album is quickly superseded by what can only be described as noise. I would say I'm getting old, but Frusciante is 10 years my senior and he thinks this is acceptable.

As I said at the top, I've never been a fan of RHCP and this has done nothing to change my opinion of them. This is nothing but a desperate attempted to be relevant. But just as RHCP write the same tune, slightly differently with nonsensical lyrics, Frusciante has done that here with his – astonishingly – eleventh solo offering. This makes me think that if you make it, albeit in an mediocre and overrated band, you’ll have the financial backing and support to pump out all shades of sh… 

Every track on this album made my ears bleed. It had absolutely no redeeming features; no clever fret-work, no killer hooks, no catchy choruses, no emotive lyrics and no beautiful soundscapes.

He wanted this album to be a bubbling pot of all his musical influences. That it was. But not in a seamless, fluid, intelligent or innovative way. It was like a aliens had come to Earth and found the music department in a run-down inner-city school and were trying everything out to see what this shiny metal thing does.

On March 29, 2014, a copy of Enclosure was loaded onto an experimental Cube Satellite dubbed by Record Collection as Sat-JF14 and launched into space aboard an Interorbital Systems NEPTUNE Modular Rocket. In my opinion, that’s where it should've stayed.

0 out of 10

Published on June 2 2014