Iggy Pop Finds Solace On His New, Possibly Last LP

By Chicagoist_Guest in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 18, 2016 5:15PM

Iggy Pop and his band (photo by Andreas Neumann)

By Andy Derer

Album Review: Iggy Pop's Post Pop Depression

Iggy Pop, arguably one of the architects of modern punk rock, has always walked the line between aggression and likability. Even when he was rolling around on stage on broken glass during the ‘70s as frontman for the Stooges, you couldn’t help but root for the guy. Maybe it was his Motor City humility. He never messed with concept albums or characters like his longtime collaborator, David Bowie. He never approached anything close to politics. He was about the party.

But when this album was announced out of the blue, weeks after Bowie’s passing and mere months after the Bataclan tragedies in Paris, with the title of Post Pop Depression, the world was ready for Iggy’s darkest album ever. His previous forays in maturity (something the 68-year-old has really only slightly flirted with), like 1999’s Avenue B and on 2009’s Préliminaires, were stilted, awkward affairs that made the listener crave the Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Post Pop Depression is the first time since The Idiot that Iggy has created a dark, mature work that remains true to the punk rocker we all fell in love with.

This album grew out of a series of text messages early last year between Iggy and Joshua Homme (Queens Of The Stone Age). The conversation sparked an artistic collaboration between the two that one can’t help but compare to Iggy’s days riding shotgun with Bowie. Especially when Iggy and Josh hit the late night talk show circuit last month, the sight of Iggy next to a tall red-headed rocker was something familiar.

The chemistry between the two is certainly palpable beginning with the first shaky bar chords of “Gardenia,” Post Pop Depression’s first single. Recorded mostly at the down-home desert studio Rancho De La Luna, the album is full of dusky sonic vistas drenched in a sepia tone. One could call Post Pop Depression the flip side of Lust For Life. Josh has said that the creation of this album help keep him sane after having his other band, Eagles Of Death Metal, targeted by the Bataclan atrocities. (“The fact that I had this to work on, it saved me,” he told the New York Times.) There is certainly a feeling of dread in the album’s nine songs, with a dash of hope thrown in the mix.

This is no somber meditation on gun violence, though, or even an eulogy to Bowie, Iggy’s fallen friend. Instead, Post Pop Depression finds Iggy looking inward and taking inventory of a life less ordinary. He recalls love found and lost on “Break Into Your Heart,” a warped hymn of an opening salvo; revisits debauchery on “In The Lobby,” a spiky, busy math-rocker which should explode in the live setting; and remembers life on the road on “German Days.” All these songs brim with centered meditation, without coming off as an old man reliving past glories—and “Sunday” even has a danceable backbeat, courtesy of Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys), plus a rolling baseline from Homme. The overall sound is of four guys working songs out in the same room, not exchanging a bunch of files over email.

With the Stooges ravaged by death, Iggy’s latest band sounds like something he could return to again and again. Iggy has teased that Post Pop Depression may be his final record, but we hope that he uses David Bowie’s life as a template, and makes art until his final breath.

Post Pop Depression comes out today. Iggy Pop is also touring, and will play the Chicago Theatre April 6; find ticket info here.

Andy Derer is host of The Andy Derer Show, one of Chicago's longest running music interview podcasts. He is also a writer, musician and restaurateur from the western suburb of Westmont. The man is also an outspoken proponent of the compact disc and owns over 4,000 of them.