Artist: Iggy Pop Stars: **1/2
Title: Beat Em Up Label: Virgin |
Is Iggy Pop the new old Glen Danzig,
or is Glen Danzig the old new Iggy
Pop? Is the opener "Mask", in which
Iggy repeatedly howls, "Which mask
are you?" a sign that Mr Pop has
completed a degree is post-modern
identity politics, especially when he
rants "Everybody in LA just plain licking
ass or having it licked"? Is this a sign
of Iggy's willingness to finally question
his material existence, a Foucaldian
take on power and institutions
post-Stooges? And is Iggy's "I'm
l-o-s-t, lost!" a reiteration of Derrida's
theoretical postitionings on the nature
of language as a shifting system?
Well, as Iggy says on track 13, "It's all
shit." Iggy is Iggy, glass-slashings
down his chest or not. The reflective,
some might say mellowing Iggy of 99's
Avenue B is gone, and on Beat Em Up
Mr Pop is back at his brutal brayings, a
beast searching for prey, and finding it
on the final seven minutes of VIP. Beat
Em Up throbs like a penis, squeals like
a hamster on fire, and even, as the
title suggests, howls like a werewolf on
"Howl" (no relation to Allen Ginsberg's
masterful poem, just in case you were
wondering.) Is it any good? That's
hard to say. Iggy's been around for so
long this music seems to ooze out of
him, heavy riffs that were responsible
for Guns N Roses breathed back into
existence by his tight backing band
that wear their garage stripes with
pride.
Beat Em Up breaks no new ground,
turns no new soil in Iggy's search for
salvation through punk n roll. Iggy's no
Lou Reed, and this is no "New York."
But then again, Iggy's never pretended
to be Lou, he's always been content
being the speed-addled junkie boy
from the gutter made good then bad
all over again, and as much as it's
formulaic, it works. Avenue B was a
departure that I enjoyed, seeing Iggy's
frailty exposed to the world. Beat Em
Up sees Iggy back in the fighting
game, and it's a nice upper left for all
concerned. |
Artist:Various Stars: ****
Title: The Tigers Remixes Label: Sensory
Projects/Inertia
This review was first published in Delusions of
Adequacy |
I've had this CD spinning in my stereo
and in my head for the last four
weeks, and I'm still baffled. It's
beautiful, it's deranged, it's disarmingly
distant at times, and at others
claustrophobic. Above all, it's the mark
of a band that refuse to be defined by
generic constraints, a group committed
to the lost art of fucking with
boundaries.
The Tigers hail from Perth, a sunny
city on the west coast of Australia
that is closer to a host of other Asian
countries than it is to the nearest
capital city in Oz. Perth's isolation
breeds a strange crew, a unique
musical scene that is more often less
pretentious yet more experimental
than that of the larger suburban
sprawls of Sydney, and The tigers are
no exception. Somehow though
they've managed to adopt a sound
zillions of years away from that
traditionally associated with Aussie
rock, and it's this sound that has
attracted some indie-music bigwigs to
remix their work across 2 CDs.
These remixers include David Pajo, aka
Papa M, whose reworking of "Beneath
My Hands" remains one of the
creepiest sounding songs I've heard all
year. For seven and a half minutes a
vocal refrain that begins with "Beneath
my hands are small breasts of
upturned gullies (?)" is repeated as an
acoustic guitar note is picked over and
over again, and sequenced loops dig
their hands into the seamless
structure. Doug Gillard, from Guided By
Voices, turns "Cramer's Jungle" into a
post-piano dirge, punctuated by
occasional beats and trumpet blasts
that drop in and out, whilst Chris
McCormick, a musician known for
handing out CD-R's of his music,
creates a psychosonic journey of his
own in "Up & Down The Shaft." And all
this occurs in the first 4 songs of disc
A.
By the end of the first CD, as Mark
Cooper fuses electronica with country
on "Snow Pea Remix", you feel as if
you're finally getting a handle on
something, a firm position to sit back
and appraise the situation. Then Disc 2
wipes its seedy fingers across your
cheek and you're left wondering who
the fuck let avant-dub trance into the
hallowed indie halls. Apparently
deliberately sequenced like this, the
beats are spliced and spritzed, sprayed
back through the speakers like spit.
Classy title award goes to Running
From Nothing's "Bad Days: Satan beat
me a pat-a-cake mix", which sounds
exactly as the title suggests it does,
synth squeezed tightly out an
icing-tube, bass galore and a detached
lyric revolving around two words - Go
Away.
Remixes is as confounding and
confusing as it sounds, but that's in no
way a bad thing. It's a collection that
demands repeated, and attentive,
listenings, the way music should. Each
remix reveals something more, a detail,
a glance that may have been
overlooked in the original now at the
forefront of interpretation. Complex,
strange, eclectic yet undeniably great. |
