If Iggy Pop is as sick of the world as he appears to be on Paraguay, the scathing closer to his 17th studio album, it’s hard to feel sorry for him. “I’m goin’ where sore losers go,” he croons into a galloping drum beat, “to hide my face and spend my dough.” As he makes clear, it’s only a dream, but he could do it.
That arch yet honest sentiment is typical of Post Pop Depression, a caustic kiss-off of an album that’s being hyped as (potentially) his last. This time around, the 68-year-old recruited Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal to channel the gloomy decadence of his two Berlin-recorded solo albums with David Bowie, The Idiot and Lust For Life. Homme and Pop financed the album and recorded in secret in the California desert with players that included Dean Fertita of the Dead Weather and Matt Helders of Arctic Monkeys.
In Homme, Pop has found a producer with a knack for crafting songs that feel punchy but also build deliberately. This gives him room to deliver his grizzled baritone with a precise but overbearing theatricality. This isn’t a return to the blistering noise of the Stooges at all, but an album of swooping, mostly likeable melodies, swaggering albeit inoffensive riffs, mariachi rhythms and vocal harmonies.
Through it all Pop reflects on mortality, sex and his place in life in direct lyrics often plodding in their rhyme schemes. He seems caught in a place between wizened wild child and something kookier, but he’s apparently too content to go whole hog in either direction.
Top track: Sunday
Iggy Pop plays the Sony Centre on April 9. See listing.
