Review Summary: To call Smile From the Streets You Hold a collection of ‘music’ is hard enough, let alone anything beyond that.
Whether you know it or not, you have, invariably, heard this album. You’ve heard it played on the corner of wind-swept and littered streets of the city, you’ve heard it in the hallways of high school where the musos gathered, or in the dark, dingy pubs of aspiring musicians. They called it art, they called it fun – whatever it was, you listened, laughed and walked away with a shadow of a smile.
No one is smiling here though.
They’re too busy cleaning the blood out of their ears.
Where the kids in school were hilarious when they tried to imitate their rock gods on acoustics, strumming away to Kill ‘Em All and singing out of tune and time to impress the girls, where you dropped a penny for the man on the street trying to make a life for himself, there’s none of those same feelings here. It’s the same music, only, Frusciante took the worst aspects of those amateur, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, alone-in-the-garage s'hit and put an album together. I can’t even begin to emphasize how much of a f'ucking plane wreck this album is. While some fans of Frusciante hailed it as ‘profound’, ‘moving’ and an ‘insight into the soul’, they were pretentious pricks and they knew it. To call
Smile From the Streets You Hold a collection of ‘music’ is hard enough, let alone anything beyond that.
John’s guitar work on this album is, as would be expected, reminiscent of his work with the Chili Peppers, a sort of neo-Hendrix infusion of sounds, except this time, anything that was once fun is here depressing, anything that was once layered and sweeping is here barren and minimal. His vocals, if they could be called that, sound more like the sounds of a litter of dying cats with AIDS more than anything remotely human. That wouldn’t perhaps be so bad, if the album wasn’t instead a wailing, worthless mess of Saharan soundscape, directionless and lost. It simply doesn’t
go anywhere – Even some of the most frantic, chaotic music I've heard has
some sense of flow or direction. Sure, this has got some sort of stream-of-consciousness thing going, with John playing and singing whatever the f'uck he wants (around certain melodies of course), but while some music of the vein flows like water on crystal, this is more like muck on the corpses of the dead. It's just jarring, off-putting and ultimately simply unlistenable.
There’s no use in picking out specific tracks here, nothing here is memorable, only the lucidity of abrasiveness will remain in your head, scratch and tear marks from a vicious and useless album. Even when one or two songs like
Poppy Man or
For Air appear to relieve you from the blizzard, it doesn’t matter.
Smile is so exhausting and draining that they end up more like paper barriers to a nuclear demolition. I don't care that this album is the portrait of soul ripped apart by the elements of the world, so high on heroin that he probably couldn’t walk straight; it plays more like a caricature of everything music has ever stood for. There no beauty here, nothing profound, just the aural doodling of a man who was only then in for the money.
0.5/5
