★★★★★
Back in 2016, when five decades of service to rock’n’roll had left him battered, bruised and embittered, it really did seem as if Iggy Pop might call it a day. His album of that year, Post Pop Depression, ended with a song called Paraguay on which he threatened to escape into the South American jungle, never to return. Iggy Pop pretty much invented punk back with the Stooges, one of the greatest bands of all time but too ahead of their time to break through commercially, at least during their original 1967-74 run. He collaborated with David Bowie on his grainy 1977 classic art rock albums The Idiot and Lust for Life, only for Bowie to take the template (and songs like China Girl) and reach new heights in his own career. So now, at 75, you can understand why Pop might want to throw in the towel. Instead he has come back with his best album in decades.
Every Loser is a consolidation of his entire career, wrapped up in songs that eschew the modern celebrity’s tendency to be grateful for everything in favour of complaining about everything. On Modern Age Rip Off, which takes the blistering riff of the killer Stooges song TV Eye and gives it a twist, Pop rants about not being able to smoke a joint any more, living in a pain-racked body and just generally being a grumpy old git. On the more gentle Morning Show he takes a stoic approach to the challenge of facing up to each day, while Comments finds him confessing to the classic mistake of being discombobulated by nasty social media comments about him. And on the blisteringly heavy Frenzy he screams words of hatred at, essentially, the entire world. It is honest, invigorating, nasty and brilliant.
All of this has been encouraged by a new producer. Andrew Watt is a 32-year-old New Yorker who got his break writing songs for, of all people, Justin Bieber, but he’s a rocker at heart and it was his idea to get Pop to make an album that sounded like all the Iggy Pops rolled into one, but with radio-friendly craftsmanship and immediacy thrown in. That’s why we get a beautiful, elegant piece of new wave called The Regency, which, with its chorused backing vocals, shimmering guitars and Pop crooning about the horrors of the stadium rock aristocracy, sounds a lot like Tonight, a tale of a drug overdose from Lust for Life. Then there is All the Way Down, a close relative of the Stooges’ sleazy rocker Loose, and a tribute to Miami called New Atlantis, “a beautiful whore of a city” and Pop’s home for the past two decades, which could have come from his 1986 mainstream breakthrough Blah-Blah-Blah. In recent years Iggy Pop’s albums have headed increasingly towards the experimental. Here he goes straight for the rock jugular, throwing in a lot of humour, fun and a big middle finger to modern life along the way. (Atlantic/Gold Tooth)
