The possibility of a resurrection

Iggy Pop has made his 808s and Heartbreak. Thankfully, unlike Kanye West, Pop is not singing his latest album, Préliminaires, in Auto-Tune.

Instead, he's come up with something equally disturbing to legions of fans: Iggy Pop has gone French.

Hard-core acolytes of the Motor City proto-punk messiah will likely dismiss the album as a 62-year-old, washed-up superstar finally losing it. Others might see an entirely evolved, contemplative and melancholy Pop.

Naturally, Pop stumbles and grasps for balance at times. He is entirely unfamiliar with the musical foundations beneath him, singing against low tempo nostalgic arrangements rather than the bruising riffs of The Stooges. His mistakes, however, only serve to endear him to the listener.

The album, based on a 2005 novel, The Possibility of an Island, written by French author Michel Houellebecq, occupies a vague place between the two peaks of Pop's solo career, The Idiot and Lust for Life.

Thematically, Préliminaires hews much closer to 1977's The Idiot - a dark, downward heroin-fueled spiral into anomie. This time, Pop's descent is fueled not by narcotics but by death, namely that of his fellow Stooge, guitarist and bassist Ron Asheton.

The archetypical rock star who has somehow survived this long is not quite sure how he got here, and his elegiac sentiments permeate the work, making it much more resonant. Truth be told, this album, if sung by anyone other than Pop, would likely drift by to little notice or acclaim. Yet, there is something about the way Pop slows down and croaks each word that is just right.

A simple line like "I don't know where my spirit went/ but that's all right" from "I Want to Go to the Beach" would be mild if not for Pop stressing and elongating the "all right" until every ounce of resignation fully sets in. Later, he asserts, "You can convince the world/ That you're some kind of superstar/ When an asshole is what you are."

It is clear Pop has left the concept of the novel somewhat behind, using it as a springboard to delve into matters far more interesting to the general listener than the story of a hedonist named Daniel and two of his clones. In fact, it is Pop's persona upon which the album truly hinges. One listens to find out what happens when the famed spark in his eyes from that Lust for Life cover begins to die out.

"A Machine for Loving" features Pop reading from The Possibility of an Island in a spoken word monologue and using Houellebecq's words for his own effect: "Love is simple to define/ But it seldom happens/ In the series of beings."

Unsurprisingly, the motif of dogs as machines for loving was Pop's favorite part of the novel (his biggest hit with The Stooges, after all, was "I Wanna Be Your Dog") and drives the sublime "King of the Dogs."

The song immediately explodes with blustering jazz arrangements, with a large brassy backing for Iggy's lyrics, written from the perspective of a dog. It is not quite fusion and it's not quite vintage hot jazz, but it works as Iggy repeatedly croons he is simply "the King of the Dogs."

"Spanish Coast" is endemic both of Préliminaire's promise and shortcomings. Once again, Iggy's delivery is brilliantly mournful. He drops his voice down and sings in a gravelly timbre: "Die, die, die on the Spanish Coast/ Die like a love." Unfortunately, to reach the heart of the song, one must disregard some mediocre and entirely unnecessary faux strings.

It is clear Iggy does not quite have command over his new sound just yet. He opts for drum machines and digital pulses and when he should be more organic. In "Nice to Be Dead," he regresses in the worst way possible, not broiling enough to resurrect The Stooges and too hard to fit the mood of the larger work. The success he finds in evoking New Orleans jazz is limited only to one track.

These gaps are not exactly potholes. Pop was never about perfection. He was never quite appreciated enough in his age, even needing royalties from a David Bowie cover to help him stay afloat. Then, by the time the rest of the world had caught up to him, nobody wanted to hear his new solo work - only the immortal back catalogue.

In short, he has always been an outcast, either too ahead or too far behind any one scene or genre. Therefore, it is fitting that he makes a not altogether cohesive, sometimes bumbling, absolutely inspired semi-masterpiece in his twilight. Some say Iggy has gone soft, but the man who once rolled around in shards of broken glass on stage deserves to tell us how it feels to look at the scars.

vmain13@umd.edu

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars