Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium

Herald rating: * * * *

On their last studio album, 2002's By The Way, the one-time mad bastard funk-punks mellowed out and restrained themselves. It was a great record, their best set of songs since 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik took them from outrageous 80s also-rans to Gen-X's own Rolling Stones. After all, they too were a band of over-sexed white guys mining black music while falling into bad habits and suffering casualties along the way.

But putting musicality before muscularity had its downside. The album slipped by almost unnoticed, selling many millions fewer than its predecessor, Californication, the album which marked the return of guitarist cum artist-in-residence John Frusciante after years in a drug addicted wilderness.

So while following up with a double album - and the indulgence such collections beg - might seem like pure folly, it has a certain logic.

All that width allows for familiarity, with most of the two hours and 28 songs sounding like the Red Hot Chili Peppers much of the planet know and love, only more so. But listen long enough and there are moments that show the increasing musicality and maturity of a band who have now been releasing albums for 22 eventful years.

It's frequently hard to believe they are such veterans. There are plenty of bands half their age aping the jerky 80s art funk of Talking Heads. When RHCP get the urge, as they do on Turn It Again, it comes complete with Frusciante's devastating Hendrixian guitar and a chorus that gives the album's second disc, Mars - after the first, Jupiter - a giant late-arriving power surge.

Frusciante's guitar work stars, throughout whether he's adding just-so touches to the shades-of-Under-The-Bridge tracks Strip My Mind and Desecration Smile, or switching from syncopated scratch to multi-tracked riff attack on Charlie. Likewise, the once slap-happy bass playing of Flea is a wondrous thing, filling the space where most other bands would need another guitarist.

Combined with the ever-solid drumming of Chad Smith and Anthony Kiedis' vocal presence, here RHCP show they are still a band who manage a healthy profit on the sum-of-their-parts formula.

The album does have a few too many tracks - like the utterly disposable Hump De Bump - which sound like they could have sprung from the days when the band was best known for doing interesting things with men's hosiery on their privates. But it offers one thing a RCHP album never has before - a song to get you down the aisle. On Hard to Concentrate, Kiedis offers a persuasively lovely marriage service set to percolating drums and sweetly chiming guitar.

It does come straight after a lustful funk number, Tell Me Baby, that might well have sprung from RHCP's wild and woolly butt-naked years. Yes, despite encroaching middle age they still believe in socks before marriage.

Label: Warners