Red Hot Chili Peppers: Mother's Milk [CAPITOL]

Why you'll love it

This 180g edition comes from Capitol's From the Vaults series and carries the extended version of "Pretty Little Ditty." It's the first Chili Peppers album with John Frusciante and Chad Smith, and their first gold record.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• From the Vaults series
• Extended "Pretty Little Ditty"

About the album

Mother's Milk is a record about starting again. Dedicated to the memory of guitarist Hillel Slovak, it found Anthony Kiedis and Flea rebuilding the band around two new arrivals: a teenage guitar prodigy named John Frusciante and a hard-hitting drummer from Detroit named Chad Smith. The lineup that would go on to conquer the world starts here, on a record cut in Los Angeles with the four of them still getting to know each other.

Michael Beinhorn produced, and the sound is all muscle: funk-metal riffs, slap bass and Frusciante's wiry, melodic guitar. Their roaring cover of Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" became the band's calling card, "Knock Me Down" is a heartfelt warning about excess written in Slovak's memory, and "Taste the Pain" and "Subway to Venus" swing hard, with horns on the latter. There's also a bruising take on Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," the rowdy "Stone Cold Bush" and the sunny instrumental "Pretty Little Ditty," a little tune that hip hop producers would go on to sample.

Two years later the same four players made Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Mother's Milk is the sound of them working out how to fit in a room together, at considerable volume.

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Tracklist

Listen

On EMI USA / Capitol, a reissue of the 1989 album.