It’s with an overwhelming sense of relief that your correspondent emerges from his bunker, armed only with headphones and an empty teapot. Twenty-eight songs spread across two CDs, entitled Mars and Jupiter, portend that Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ninth album is heavy of concept. But it’s not really.

Stadium Arcadium is peppered with a hatful of premium paeans by the lead singer Anthony Kiedis to lost Californian souls. “Who’s gonna take you home and hold you when things aren’t so right?” from the lilting She Looks to Me is typical — as, indeed, is the excellent new single Dani California. If they were all as good as that it would have been a breeze in that bunker.

Alas, the worst songs on Stadium Arcadium are the ones that remind you what Red Hot Chili Peppers used to stand for. So Much I and Torture Me are triumphs of virtuosity over melody, the sound of a band playing catch-up on Michael “Flea” Balzary’s tricksy basslines. Hump De Bump is a throwback to the indie disco, when the DJ would feel obliged to drop in the boorish jock-funk of 1991 hit Give It Away for people who thought this was what alternative music sounded like.

For some of us, the schooled funkiness on which the Chilis prided themselves was always the problem with them. Kiedis likes to relate indignantly what Malcolm McLaren said to the band when he met them 21 years ago: “Simplify the music completely.” Kiedis claims that Flea’s reaction was almost to keel over and pass out. But why, you wonder, does he think recent Chilis albums have helped to make them one of the five most bankable rock bands in the world? Over at the iTunes store the statistics on the band’s most downloaded songs are weighted towards the tender pop elegies such as Zephyr Song, Californication and Under the Bridge — the addiction memoir which, more than any other, created the modern Chilis template.

It’s a similar tale on Stadium Arcadium. Persevere and you’ll find that somewhere among the morass is a single album that stands up to their best work. On If an almost liturgical intensity underpins the group’s most unadorned and affecting love song to date. Lyrically and musically Make You Feel Better sounds like the Friends theme but with loads of minor chords so that it’s good. Slow Cheetah is the tender, fortysomething Chili Peppers stripped by their longtime producer Rick Rubin to their fundamentals — shaky post-rehab mornings and lost pretty girls trying to fill their inner void. The exquisite, tumbling melancholia of Desecration Smile; the emotional upswell of the title track; the huge chorus of Warlocks — all of these will surely cling to radio playlists shortly.

Transmitting from the most harmonious phase in the band’s 22-year life, Kiedis says that the group had enough ace material for a triple set. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? It’s a little late to expect modesty.

Warner

PETE PAPHIDES