Released by Astralwerks. Order the album from Amazon.
Iggy Pop’s excuse to record Préliminaires, a New Orleans-flavoured jazz album, is that he got tired of hearing “idiot thugs with guitars.” To fans of The Stooges, this might seem a tad hypocritical — their 2007 thug-guitar record, The Weirdness, is probably one of the worst albums of the decade — but it’s also kind of admirable, in typical Iggy Pop fashion. He’s never been the most astute musician, and is usually only as good as the people he’s inspired by. In the late ’70s, of course, it was David Bowie; today, it’s French author Michel Houellebecq, whose The Impossibility of an Island propelled the Igster to retreat to the studio armed with his best work in years. (Which, admittedly, isn’t saying much — but still.)
The concept is ostensibly goofy — come on, Iggy Pop singing in French and doing spoken-word over jazz tunes? — but it does work, seemingly in spite of itself. Whether he’s covering Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma or singing about dogs yet again, there’s something inherently pleasant about this album. No, it’s not great. No, there’s nothing that particularly stands out on first listen (apart from the single, “King of the Dogs,” which sounds a lot like something Bob Dylan might have recorded this decade). It’s just kind of nice – the soundtrack to a tired artist finding some much-needed inspiration in fresh channels. It also beats a plethora of those inferior, generic international-music-as-performed-by-Americans touristy compilation discs you can find sitting on dependably dusty shelves at your local music store.
The most amusing aspect of Préliminaires is that its weakest track is also its heaviest — “Nice to Be Dead” finds Iggy falling back on old habits, with a churning riff, heavy drums and growling vocals, a sort of swamp-marsh punk rock mash-up. It’s mediocre enough that it begs the question of whether Iggy should have moved away from punk long ago, and the album as a whole is interesting enough to make you hope his follow-up boasts some stronger songwriting.
Rating: 
Choice cuts: “King of the Dogs,” “Je Sais Que Tu Sais”
