Oddly, as the Chili Peppers have descended further into homogenized mainstream sounds, they’ve chosen to celebrate the fact with - gasp - a two-cd set. So, like, there’s "more" to not like here.

Don’t get me wrong folks. There was actually a time when I really enjoyed these guys and consider myself part of that pre-"Under The Bridge" group - you know, when the band played hyperactive fun music. As a "serious" band, the Red Hots wallow in mediocrity thanks in large part to Anthony Keidis’ struggling vocal and songs that are simply far too easy to forget.

That’s part of the reason for the lateness of this review, actually. As I write this, I barely have any sense of how this record actually sounds. Songs like the opening "Dani California" just sort of smear into "Desecration Smile" and so on and so forth. Somewhere in the muck, one disc ends and another one begins. Going through the simple effort of putting another disc of this in your player just doesn’t have any sort of payoff. I mean, how dare they make us "work" like this?

I’m making it sound like this is a new standard in "bad" and to be fair - it isn’t. There’s plenty that is much worse than the adequately noisy "Especially In Michigan" or Keidis various "singing" attempts (most notably on the title track - yow!). It’s just that the band gets points deducted for spreading this out over two discs while they could have celebrated mediocrity more efficiently with one disc.

Zing!