One Hot Minute [Import]

Red Hot Chili Peppers | Format: Audio Cassette

Product Details

• Audio Cassette (September 12, 1995)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Warner Bros / Wea
• ASIN: B000002MTS
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (194 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #359,349 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Warped

2. Aeroplane

3. Deep Kick

4. My Friends

5. Coffee Shop

6. Pea

7. One Big Mob

8. Walkabout

9. Tearjerker

10. One Hot Minute

11. Falling into Grace

12. Shallow Be Thy Game

13. Transcending

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

At the time of its release, One Hot Minute was viewed as the beginning of a new direction for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Guitarist John Frusciante had departed and former Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro joined the ranks after some false starts with short-lived replacements. Band chemistry here isn't quite up to past standards. Navarro stretches out throughout the album, imbuing tunes with a heavy dose of hard rock and psychedelia and providing a stark contrast from Frusciante's dexterous noodling. Tracks such as "Warped" and "Aeroplane" display a band prone to exploring a less frenetic hard rock, while "Shallow Be Thy Game" sounds like the old band. Frusciante eventually returned to the fold, so this 1995 collection now stands as a curious intermission for the Peppers. --Rob O'Connor

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tied with BloodSugarSexMagik, February 4, 2004

By 

CrimsonCrossbone (The High Seas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Hot Minute (Audio CD)

For best Chili's cd. The two are also in my top ten albums of all time. This is the darkhorse of the Chili's album catalogue and seems to be the one that no one likes. I really don't see why. First of all, contrary to popular belief, Dave Navarro is an absolutely amazing guitarist. However, he gets bashed on because he's not John Frusciante. Why? No one cared that Frusciante wasn't Hillel Slovak! Secondly, people complain that this cd is too repetitive. Why?! This is perhaps one of the most diverse cds the Peppers have ever created. Flea sings on some songs including a solo piece. A New guitar player. Music borrowed from almost every genre and capitalized on. This cd spans alternative ( Aeroplane, Deep Kick), Metal (Coffee Shop, Warped), Modern Rock ( My Friends) Experimentation (Pea, Walkabout) and thats only like half the cd! This cd takes you on a musical journey and is lushly diverse from start to finish. If only they would've kept Dave for even one more album, that would have been incredible. But this is perhaps the Chilis at their creative peak, save BSSM. Absolutely essential listening.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Weird Detour from RHCP, November 16, 2006

By 

WalterDigsTunes - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Hot Minute (Audio CD)

Ragging on this album just because of Dave Navarro's presence is unwarranted. Face it: The Chili Peppers have seen various different guitarists in their albums, and each compliments Flea's bass and Kiedis' vocals in a suitable manner. Navarro just happened to be heavier.

This album IS, in my a opinion, a strange detour from the line of continuity that the Chili Peppers had been following. The first album was patchy funk affair nurtured under the hollow production imposed by GoF's Andy Gill. The second album saw a lazy, fun sort of funk come to the fore under the auspices of George Clinton. With "The Uplift Mofo Party Plan," there was a move towards trebly funk rock. 1989's "Mother's Milk" was a great blend of powerful funk rhythms and massive guitar overdubs. The sound was rather balanced by the sheer intensity of it all, and the production made it all enjoyable. The next album, "Blood Sugar Sex Magik," brough the production back to a more stable level. It was here where the care-free funk and the unique guitar work were allowed to flourish in their own manner. And the results were great.

But "One Hot Minute" sees the production values take an abrupt dark shift. The general atmosphere of the album is one of hazy psychedelia meshed with overly dark sensibilities. Songs like Warped, Deep Kick and the title track best exhibit this foray into the dark side. The psychedelia comes to the fore on both the funky numbers (Walkabout, Falling into Grace) and poppier tracks like Airplane. Both of these types of songs inhabit a barely lucid realm that's totally different from the band-in-a-room sound on the previous album. Sometimes, the darkness and the psych can both manifest themselves within the confines of a particular song. All of this can be rather unsettling for those accustomed to a funky, happy-go-lucky sort of juvenile sound.

The songs themselves are much more difficult to swallow than the tracks on previous albums. Those albums had a lot of filler and throwaway tracks, while all of BSSM could be enjoyably absorbed in a single sitting. With "One Hot Minute," however, the overbearing heavyness makes it hard to listen to the album over and over. Navarro's guitar sound is just too heavy in many ways, and it drowns our Flea's characteristic bass in many instances. The vocals on the tracks rely more on attitude than content (as always with Kiedis), but there's a certain straightforward approach here that stands in contrast with the more playful mannerisms of previous album. The various songs can be instantly catchy or tough to assimiliate, but very few are actually terrible. For instance, the title track descents into unnecessary repetition which just hurts its value in the end. But, for the most part, the tracks are all quite solid in their own right.

This album seems to head down a direction that defies the route that the Chili Peppers seemed to have been following. The production and the songs, coupled with the heavier guitar sound and vocal approach, made it tough to stomach this piece of work. In retrospect, however, it manages to stand on its own quite well. It's not a dud; it's just an odd digression that will take some time to reconcile and appreciate.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most skilled RHCP album, February 11, 2006

By 

TFM (From A Land...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Hot Minute (Audio CD)

One Hot Minute may be the Red Hot Chili Peppers most puzzling release, but at the same time, it is their most skilled album, which is pretty much why many people did not like it. That, and of course the John Frusciante bias.

Deviating from the John Frusciante melodies of 1989's Mother's Milk and 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the Dave Navarro era of the Red Hot Chili Peppers focused mainly on song movement, skill, rhythm and power.

Unlike the rest of the Red Hot Chili Peppers catalogue, melodies on this album is all but non-existent, and all four members from Anthony Kiedis' vocals, to Flea's textured bass, to Navarro's surging guitar, and Chad Smith's well timed drumming strove more to create more driving rhythms based in psyhedelia ("Aeroplane", "Transcending", "Tearjerker", "My Friends"), blues (Flea's solo "Pea"), funk ("Shallow Be Thy Game", "Aeroplane", "Falling Into Grace", and "Deep Kick"), jazz ("Walkabout"), and metal ("One Big Mob", "Transcending", "One Hot Minute", and "Coffee Shop"). However, at times efforts floundered and some of the songs, most notably "One Big Mob" and the title track, end up much longer than needed. Nonetheless, One Hot Minute is a rather cohesive album.

As for the chemistry issues people always claim, the fact those criticisms draw mainly Navarro's entry into the band being compared to Frusciante's entry is highly unfair. Frusciante was well familiar with previous guitarist Hillel Slovak and took after him quite a bit (as you hear on Mother's Milk) as for Navarro he did not draw on much from his predecessor, but from his days with Jane's Addiction.

So in closing, if you want to look at it in terms of songwriting, it may be not as good as its predecessor, but understand, this was Navarro's first and only time with the band and he did not do much to be like Frusciante. If you want to look at this in terms of skill, riffs, and power, than this probably has the best out of all of the Red Hot Chili Peppers albums.

KEY TRACKS: "Aeroplane", "Warped", "Coffee Shop", "Shallow Be Thy Game", "Transcending", "Falling Into Grace", and "Walkabout".