Iggy and the Stooges
Ready To Die
Fat Possum
Street: 04.30
Iggy and the Stooges = MC5 + Dead Kennedys
I dreaded listening to this record. If 2007’s The Weirdness was any indication, the Stooges can’t be resurrected. They could have fallen back on their raw, stripped-down, live-in-’73 sound that bands today try to emulate. Instead of playing into this decade’s retromania and making a record that people would actually want to listen to, the Stooges put out a polished recording of underwhelming riffs and boring guitar solos that are devoid of the band’s original violence and energy. The title track should have been released in 1983 and “DD’s,” a lighthearted and sax-heavy song about giant boobs, could be an ’80s college movie theme song. The record’s best songs (“Unfriendly World,” “Beat That Guy” and “The Departed”) belong on an Iggy Pop solo album—they sound out of place with piano, slide guitar and are sentimentally reminiscent of recent Bob Dylan records. I wish Pop would have skipped the Stooges reunion, made a blues album, and re-released Raw Power again. –Cody Kirkland