John Frusciante — Shadows Collide With People

Brothers and sisters, check your tube socks, outrageous tattoos and funkybass slaps. While Frusciante may be best known as one of the various Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar slingers, Shadows Collide With People sounds nothing like that band (although it does tell you where some of the cooler melodies on Blood Sugar Sex Magik came from).

Frusciante certainly is an amazing pop songwriter, dropping catchy hooks and tasteful riffs left and right. While acoustically based, he beefs things up with tons of keyboards and mellotrons, giving the songs a majestic feel despite their simplicity. Musically, it’s very similar to Julian Cope, except that the lyrics are about Frusciante surviving his drug addiction, rather than Cope's spaced out observations about British landmarks.

The only real problem with the record is that it’s peppered with these little white noise sound experiments that totally pull you out of the listening experience. With this thing already clocking in at over an hour, these bits could have been left off and it would have strengthened the record.

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