Album of the Week
Give me non-comfortity or give me death. In the case of Iggy Pop's 15th solo album Preliminaires (French for "foreplay"), it seems Iggy will take a helping of both. The Godfather of Punk's new album is, in his words, "dangerously near jazz." Take that conformity. Inspired by French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s 2005 post-apocalyptic read The Possibility of an Island, Preliminaires is also soaked with doom and gloom, obsessed with death and sex.
Premliminaires is not a jazz album though. Let's clarify that immediately. It incorporate elements of jazz, but it also weaves in electro-pop, acoustic blues and even a little disco. Plainly stated, the album is all over the map, but Iggy manages to ground this melancholy and somewhat nutty affair with his signature growl and punk rock snarl.
The Iggster kicks off Preliminaires with a mostly spoken word cover of Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma's mid-century standard "Les Feuilles Mortes" (French for "Autumn Leaves"), which later widens to French crooning. It's hard to not to imagine beret-clad men and women around the world cringing at this redux, but it works for setting the tone of the album.
From there, Preliminaires delivers it's first of several melancholy Iggy-scribed hymns about ending it all, "I Want to Go to the Beach." With lyrics like "I don't know where my spirit went" and "particles of pain my brain/I guess they're here to stay," it leaves one to wonder if Iggy's life in the celebrity rock spotlight has been that bad? "King of the Dogs" -- one of two dog-themed songs on the album if you consider the spoken word piece "A Machine for Loving" a song at all -- lifts the mood for about a milli-second with its trumpets and a jazz swagger that could only be linked back to Iggy's self-proclaimed love of Louis Armstrong.
Equally as bleak as the aforementioned "I Want to Go to the Beach" is the "Spanish Coast," a song about death by sea over melodramatic synth and guitar riffs. "Die, die, die/on the Spanish Coast." It's almost too much. Luckily, Iggy does manage to throw a few dark rockers in to the mix for good measure, including "Nice to Be Dead" and the bass-heavy "She's a Business," if only to remind us of who exactly is steering this ride.
Oddly enough, or perhaps not odd at all considering the oddity of this album, the stand-out tracks on Preliminaires are the ones that defy everything one knows about Iggy Pop "punk rock god": a pretty ballad (a cover of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "How Insensitive") sung in his sweetest voice; a blues tune ("He's Dead, She's Alive") that sounds like it came straight out of the deep South, and a synth-heavy disco-sounding mockery of what it means to have a good time ("Party Time").
Preliminaires isn't comparable to anything that Iggy Pop has ever recorded before, period. And that alone makes this an album worth experiencing much in the way one experiences a David Lynch film. You're not entirely sure of what it is your watching, but you watch -- or in this case listen -- because you have a visionary at the wheel and you trust that in the end, it'll all come together. Much like life, and death.
