Iggy Pop - Free, album review

Seemingly Seamless

In many ways I don’t want to listen to this again – but of course I will because it is so compelling – but what I mean is that on a first listen it evokes as a whole, the individual tracks melding into one another as some seamless jazz/ambient and spoken word narrative, melody and meaning moving onwards as one with bursts that make it a varying but not [on the single first listen] disparate loop of sound. There are echoes too of Bowie’s final album Blackstar and it isn’t easy to pin that on any melodic links [but Sonali seems to replicate rhythmic beats from that album], though there must be, or if it is more a sense of a knowing storyline, or most likely it is in the resonant ‘echoed’ vocal of Iggy’s singing that lays down such a palpable gravitas in its very presence. Leron Thomas’ trumpet playing provides the obvious jazzier influences, but it is also the perfect complement to the overall mood in its sudden beautiful patternings. That James Bond sounds like a Franz Ferdinand song is probably the one obvious break from a continuous line, and Dirty Sanchez has Thomas laying out some classic Mexican-sounding horn loops with Iggy in strident voice [you see what happened: I have listened that second time since beginning this brief review…]. And because of this second hearing, I have to now comment on Page which is a crooner’s paradise of a song – we’re only human, no longer human never sounding so paradoxically more human than in the vibrating baritone of Iggy with Thomas caressing it in the jazz lounge of its performance. We Are the People is a Lou Reed poem narrated in front of Thomas’ background horn lament, and this is followed by another glorious amalgam of horn and Iggy’s narration of Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

We are the people without land. We are the people without tradition. We are the people who do not know how to die peacefully and at ease. We are the thoughts of sorrows. Endings of tomorrows. We are the wisps of rulers and the jokers of kings.

We are the people without right. We are the people who have known only lies and desperation. We are the people without a country, a voice or a mirror. We are the crystal gaze returned through the density and immensity of a berserk nation. We are the victims of the untold manifesto of the lack of depth of full and heavy emptiness.

We are the people without sorrow who have moved beyond national pride and indifference to a parody of instinct. We are the people who are desperate beyond emotion because it defies thought. We are the people who conceive our destruction and carry it out lawfully. We are the insects of someone else’s thought. A casualty of daytime, nighttime, space and god without race, nationality or religion. We are the people. The people. The people. 

 -  Lou Reed