As bands go they don’t get much more (self-)destructive than Jane’s Addiction, and as Jane’s Addiction band members go they don’t get much more (self-)destructive than vocalist Perry Farrell - and that’s saying something, given the existence of Dave Navarro. But that was then and this is now, and, at the age of 60, a cleaned-up Farrell is dropping his first solo album for 18 years, Kind Heaven, and for better or for worse there’s nothing destructive about it.
Real name Peretz Bernstein, the former Jane’s Addiction vocalist took on the name Perry Farrell in the mid 80s ostensibly to sound like the word “peripheral”, and that adjective is strangely applicable to Kind Heaven - not in the sense of a lack of importance, more that it is an album of peripheries with no discernible solid core.
But then that’s surely the point. Leading with ‘(red, white and blue) Cheerfulness’ sets up a comfortable, catchy but essentially straightforward alt rock record - it’s a bright song but were it not for Farrell’s banshee vocals it wouldn’t stand out in a playlist. Not so lead single ‘Pirate Punk Politician’, a gigantic, roaring protest song which sounds like a lost collaboration between Farrell’s old band and Rage Against The Machine - colossal funk-flavoured riffs decorated with Farrell’s distinctive wail, with some industrial synths thrown in for good measure. This formula is somewhat revisited on ‘Machine Girl’, where brooding industrial verses explode into a slamming chorus, but even here there’s a slide away from the record’s firm middle to its diverse and sometimes haphazard edges.
Indeed, as it progresses, Kind Heaven reveals itself to better resemble a polygon from a GCSE maths paper than a solidly-constructed regulation quadrilateral; the showman bravado of ‘Snakes Have Many Hips’ is infectious and sounds exactly like you’re imagining, but is completely at odds to the confused din of Europop synths which plagues certified stinker ‘Spend The Body’. Then there is another antipode in the form of the hauntingly minimal ‘Where Have You Been All My Life’ and still another in the luscious orchestral sweeps of closer ‘Let’s All Pray For This World’.
Kind Heaven is about as easy to rationalise as a toaster made of bread, and even after several listens it’s hard to tell whether that’s actually a good thing or not. Shot through with moments of magic, the record is not so much a cohesive whole split into nine pieces as a china plate dropped on a concrete floor to break into nine shards - sharp, irregular and ultimately beyond repair.
Words - Joe Ponting