Iggy Pop
Préliminaires
Rating: 3.0
Label: Astralwerks
There are a number of WTF factors about Iggy Pop’s approximately 15th studio album, Préliminaires. I was about evenly split between “Hey this could be interesting” and “Hey this could be a car wreck.” First there’s that French title, which translates to “foreplay.” It’s loosely based on a French novel, is “dangerously near jazz” in Pop’s words, features artwork from Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, and is being released on Astralwerks, the electro-centric label that made the Chemical Brothers and Fat Boy Slim popular in the 1990s. Remembering the last time Pop flirted with maturity, spoken word and jazzy arrangements (a few songs with Medeski, Martin & Wood) – 1999′s rather lousy Avenue B- is likewise not encouraging.
The genesis of Préliminaires came from a request for Pop to contribute songs to a documentary about author Michel Houellebecq, which eventually developed into a album inspired by Houllebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. The album has no clear narrative, although it’s apparently some kind of post-apocalyptic story, a little like The Road, but with a dog instead of a kid. The music of opener “Les Feuilles Mortes” is smoky café jazz and Pop sings in accented French. He sounds a little like iconic French decadent Serge Gainsbourg. His influence is also felt on “Je Sais Que Tu Sais,” which features a cooing female singer who recalls Gainsbourg’s duet partner Jane Birkin. For good measure, Pop covers an Antonio Carlos Jobim song as well.
As much as I like the idea of Pop playing the aging lothario, singing from a stool in a tiny Parisian café, it doesn’t always work. And for songs that are supposedly about death, sex and the end of the world, it’s pretty mellow. Fun House was a more appropriate soundtrack for the apocalypse. Still, Préliminaires is a welcome reprieve from knuckle-dragging rock and does feature some of Pop’s best singing. His voice is low and has a weathered authority, somewhat like Leonard Cohen, and he’s playing the deep, jaded crooner rather than the raw power punk shrieker. Pity the lyrics aren’t better. One of the album’s best songs, “King of the Dogs” is New Orleans funeral jazz (Pop claims Louis Armstrong as inspiration) that recalls one-time co-star Tom Waits’ junkyard music. Unfortunately, the song is sung from the point of view of a dog. The all too brief “He’s Dead/She’s Alive” is the closest Pop has been to the blues in a while, and I half-wished he had done a mostly lo-fi bluesy acoustic album. The album is full of such intriguing pathways that never get fully explored.
At this stage of his career, Pop can enjoy living legend status (partly by virtue of not being dead) and few are expecting him to do anything innovative. Pop set the bar high early on and his subsequent career has been erratic and somewhat disappointing. After all, his best solo albums are arguably his David Bowie-produced pair, The Idiot and Lust for Life, both of which came out in 1977. He reunited the Stooges a few years ago and they released their first new album of music in three decades, the misguided , which bears as much of a relationship to the Stooges’ small but awesome and unfuckwithable body of work as The Godfather III does to the original two films. So while it’s unlikely that Pop will produce anything as great and enduring as The Idiot or Fun House, Préliminaires, while not entirely successful, can stand as one of his most creative and interesting albums of the decade.
by Lukas Sherman
