Frusciante is known for his deeply personal concept albums, which stretch back to his first solo release, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt. The story of the Empyrean is a reflexive journey into Frusciante's core, a narrative of longing and spirituality and meaning seeking. To me, the album is one big, fat, experiment in sound. Picture your kid brother receiving a Casio keyboard for the first time and deciding to record an album with all the bells and whistles from the preprogrammed tracks. Not trying to minimize the effort, I'm just putting it into perspective.

Listening to Frusciante's tenth album, The Empyrean reminds me of a rather unfamiliar band, This Mortal Coil and their album, It'll End in Tears. Thanks in part to Josh Klinhoffer, the Empyrean is a synthesized experimental album, which attempts to obtain a depth and otherworldliness yet teeters on becoming a strange brew of instrumental mismatching and overly textured vocal echoes. It is definitely ambitious but falls short of a masterpiece. Yes, I get the allusion to Dante and Keats with the title. No, I don't think Frusciante attained nirvana or enlightenment with this album despite being helped along by band mate Flea and a host of talented musicians. But he does get me thinking outside my comfort zone and that's a plus.

The cover version of Tim Buckley's, "Song to the Siren" provides the dark magic we all love from Frusciante—deep, penetrating, lyrical guitar leads, flush with emotion and dripping with passion. Frusciante can wail on the guitar. His poetry resides in the way he is able to manipulate the strings to sing a soulful melody without even opening his mouth. However, tracks like "Unreachable" and "Enough of Me" make me think of Queensyrche and I am instantly vaulted into reality, where I feel the nebulous synthesizers and odd effect pedals taking over. I also understand now why Anthony Kiedis remained the lead singer and Frusciante provided the melodic back-up vocals. Sometimes melodic back-up singers do not make sense as leads, evidenced by "One More of Me". The chasm between reality and parallel universe is too big too cross in this song where discordant piano rifts, and violin solos are interspersed with peculiar bass infused-vocals and random shrieking.

"God" begins like a Genesis song, a mournful piano punctuates the layered vocals, which Frusciante has opted to fade in and out. This trick reminds me of being locked in an echo chamber in a twisted, weird kind of way. My only thought is maybe he is going for that drowning, underwater sound that is the rage among underground musicians now. Or maybe it is supposed to reflect a rebirth? Am I stretching here?

The most unforgiving song on the album, "Dark Light" reminds me of walking into Guitar Center, making a beeline for the keyboard section and simultaneously laying on all the keys to see what sound comes of it. "Dark light" has a church choir feel to it, as it should, yet is brutally overshadowed by what sounds like a monotonous drum machine. I did like "Heaven" it seemed to be the least programmed of all the songs and the lyrics, though simple, were moving. I also enjoyed "Central" which showed off the vocal range Frusciante has, a few deep growls and rhythmic vocal progressions animated the massive instrumental support behind the song.