In June of 1977, Iggy Pop appeared on Dinah Shore’s morning variety show, ostensibly to promote his debut solo album, The Idiot, with its producer—David Bowie—in tow to provide moral support. Instead, what transpired was almost an intervention, with Shore expressing quaint maternal concern for Iggy’s troubling behaviour, which included (but wasn’t limited to) chest-slashing and abandoning teenage groupies at airports. He may go down in history as the patriarch of punk and one of rock’s greatest provocateurs, but Pop's most subversive quality has always been his ability to charm the squares—after all, this is a guy whose songs have been covered by G.G. Allin and Tom Jones.
Some four decades on from his Dinah! stint, Iggy is once again making the rounds on the talk-show circuit with a dapper, red-haired rock-star pal who can help him gain a foothold in the mainstream: Queens of the Stone Age kingpin Josh Homme. While Iggy may no longer be paraded before national audience for the freak-show factor (he seemed positively bashful in the face of reverential audience applause on his recent Colbert appearance), he finds himself in the same position he was in during the mid-’70s, with the future of the (reformed) Stooges in doubt and the singer in need of direction. Where Bowie whisked Iggy off to Europe to be his electro-shocked "guinea pig," Homme lured him out to Joshua Tree last year to take stock of his life, reflect on his legacy, and contemplate his place in a modern world where he’s no longer the first "Iggy" to come up on a Google search.
The result of these private sessions is Post Pop Depression, a record that recaptures the avant-rock frisson of Iggy’s Bowie collaborations, in exploratory spirit if not explicitly in sound. For a frontman, Iggy has always done his greatest work as a passenger, riding shotgun with a musical force as potent as his personality (be it Bowie, Ron Asheton or James Williamson), and submitting himself to their sonic abuse just as he’s subjected himself to pelted ice cubes and batteries from his audience. Now, with the man making none-too-subtle hints about impending retirement, he has found a co-conspirator that can nudge him out of his comfort zone.
The album may have been recorded in secrecy, but it has become an act of public mourning. Homme's friends in The Eagles of Death Metal were caught in the crossfire of last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris, and Iggy is grieving the recent loss of his long-time champion and career savior. As the name and context suggests, Post Pop Depression is awash in a fog of melancholy. The title reads like a harbinger of the come-down that will kick in when he inevitably has to hang up his shirt (or, in his case, put one on). "I’ve got nothing but my name… I am nothing but my name," he ruefully intones during a moment of quiet reflection, bracing himself for the moment when Iggy Pop has to go back to being Jim Osterberg. Essentially, Post Pop Depression furthers the existential conversations Iggy initiated on 2013’s (likely) Stooges swan song, Ready to Die, though here he’s given more freedom to be introspective without having to overcompensate with songs about worshipping big-breasted women. But unlike previous dark-alley detours like Avenue B or Préliminaires, Post Pop Depression d0esn't sacrifice his swagger.
Musically, the album is certainly not the Queens of the Stooge Age psych-punk blowout the advance billing may have suggested and, at times, the album's ruminative nature makes you long for a little less search and a little more destroy. But it channels Iggy’s legacy in more oblique fashion, through hypnotic, bass-battering grooves (bolstered by QOTSA/Dead Weather multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders) that hearken back to the singer’s original Detroit assembly-line inspirations. And that thunderous thump is matched by lush textures: the radiant shoegazey shuffle of "Gardenia"; the orchestral swirl that caps the tough disco rumble of "Sunday"; the Kraftwerkian synth shading on "Break Into Your Heart" and the "China Girl" echoes of "American Valhalla."
The record also reasserts Iggy’s facility with simple, suggestive phrases. Pick-up lines don’t get much creepier than the album’s opening couplet: "I’m gonna break into your heart/ I’m gonna crawl under your skin". The difference is that this time, he's singing about a culture of me-first indulgence and accordingly, Iggy spends much of Post Pop Depression trying to curb his appetite for excess. "Gardenia" may playfully revel in film-noir images of seedy motel hook-ups, but amid the hedonistic throb of "Sunday" and jazz-punk swing of "In the Lobby," he posits that a lustful life can only lead to a six-foot ditch. ("I hope I’m not losing my life tonight," he sings on the latter, punctuating that last word with genuinely terrified, "TV Eye"-style shriek.) And the deceptively sweet "Chocolate Drops"—a serenade worthy of early-’70s Steely Dan—packs the record’s most bitterly sardonic sentiment: "When you get to the bottom, you’re near the top/ the shit turns into chocolate drops," a comment on the fleeting, phony nature of success from a man who’s ridden the bumpy roller coaster of fame many times.
The elaborate, theatrical set pieces that demand more of Iggy—like the spaghetti-western folk opera "Vulture" and the swashbuckling blues grind "German Days"—feel overcooked and impersonal in comparison, and bog down the mid-album momentum. But if Post Pop Depression’s refined execution has you missing the more unhinged Iggy of old, rest assured, he’s not going down without a fight. The breezy west-coast strummer "Paraguay" may find him ready to throw on the Bermuda shorts and drive off into the sunset, but he abruptly pulls a U-turn for one final middle-fingered rant to the straight world. "You take your motherfuckin’ laptop and just shove it into your goddamn foul mouth, down your shit-heeled gizzard, you fuckin’ phony, two-faced, three-timing piece of turd," he screams to no one and everyone in particular, as Homme and crew egg him on with a Queens-sized crunch and chain-gang chant. And if that proves to be the last gasp of history’s first punk, well, he’s leaving us exactly how he came in—flipping off a world that’s no fun.
