Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10

The Getaway, perhaps instead the hurried departure or even the escape from the expected, for that is the plain feeling that comes across with somewhat muted apology in the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album in five years.

The Getaway isn’t uninspiring, it does not even wander in the realms of the dull or the dreary, the last venture of a group who have thrilled for decades but somehow lost their way, it just has all the lustre of knowing that you are being forced back to school dinners in the 1970s and that the only decent, exciting meal of the week is three whole days away. The album doesn’t get above a canter, a gentle stroll through the minds of a band that will always remain important to many for their verve and guile is the offering of the day and yet deep in the undergrowth, the wilted and faded flowers on bloom, there is a little piece of chilli magic still on show.

When a band starts to take too much time out of recording it can feel as though the monotony has started to creep in, the musical ivy has start to clog up the appeal of working together or that Time just has found a way to impose the inevitable rust that must come to us all. In that semi rusty nature, the Chilis lower the tone, the heat of expression is turned down to simmer, there is no explosion, no volcano spewing fertile magma and the onslaught of destruction; simply a meadow and the thought spring lambs gambolling in the fields.

This is all well and good when a band wants to offer a softer, leaner beauty to their arsenal but in a time of confusion, in an era of faceless wonder masquerading as the cool and salvation, it surely is not the time for a group such as the Chili Peppers to become ordinary.

There is deliverance, a kind of rescue to be found in some tracks but they only add a resonance of gesture to the proceedings, an apology for the apology. Dreams Of A Samurai, The Hunter and Goodbye Angels offer a look at what might have been if the album had been recorded a couple of years earlier but on their own, stuck in a wilderness of dreams, is not enough to capture the hearts of those the band have left alone for far too long.

The Getaway, an exit plan? A lingering goodbye wrapped in the clothes of semi retirement? It certainly feels so.

Ian D. Hall