I just picked up the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Stadium Arcadium. It had gotten some good reviews and I enjoyed the album Californication, so I decided to take a chance. In the end, this 2 disc album, isn't too bad, but it's not that great either. Considering the four other RHCP albums that I own (Blood Sugar Sex Magik, One Hot Minute, Californication and By the Way), this one feels redundant. The group's sound hasn't changed too much and towards the middle of the 28 track album, I really thought I had heard a lot of these songs before. In a way, this album reminds me of how I felt about the Smashing Pumpkins 2-CD set, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, because it's just too much overload. Too bad they couldn't have trimmed this down to an extra long CD (16-17 tracks).
Have any rock groups really ever put out a really successful double CD? Excluding compilations, of course. Guns N Roses came pretty close with their simultaneous release of Use Your Illusion 1 & 2 but this RHCP CD isn't quite there. I enjoyed the Foo Fighters' In Your Honor, but it also isn't a classic. Then there's the aforementioned Smashing Pumpkins' disc, which like I mentioned before, was just Billy Corgan overload.
Tags: music, Red Hot Chili Peppers, rock, Stadium Arcadium
2 comments:
Pink Floyd's The Wall immediately comes to mind.
Also, Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti was a 2-disc set, though I'm not sure how "successful" it was.
Good ones. I wonder if as double LP's if the amount of material is a little less than double CD's.
Part of what I think makes the RHCP double CD particular overkill is that there doesn't seem to be much reasoning to the two discs (entitled "Mars" and "Jupiter"). It seems like they are trying to be just artsy enough to seem substantive, but without much actual depth.
Springsteen released two albums at once - Human Touch and Lucky Town.
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