Iggy Pop
Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023
EARMUSIC
Live albums are to Iggy Pop what last-minute victories are to the Kansas City Chiefs as of late: messy, manic affairs that alarmingly exhibit true heart-stopping muscle, might, and blind ambition—toying with risk; flaunting it, even—at the very thought of complete failure. Each outing is an exercise in fear, and is entertaining as all get-out.
Though an exquisitely produced latter-day studio album from Iggy is a thing of beauty (2016’s Post Pop Depression, 2019’s Free, and 2023’s Every Loser had their high and low points, but mostly high), any of his live discs tends to paint a fuller picture of Pop’s rushed intents, a portrait rich and raw with hunger and freneticism as his guide. Recorded with a seven-piece ensemble, Pop leaps into his deeply expansive catalog for Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 rather than focusing on one era or estimable band. Whether it’s Stooges part I, II or III, the Bowie/Berlin/Soupy-Sales-kids group, his French jazz bands, or the alt-’90s superstars gathered together by Andrew Watt for the then-concurrent Every Loser, Iggy circa 2023 made these concerts come together under Tina Turner’s lone signature mission statement: keep it nice and rough.
That means that still-new tunes such as “Frenzy” and “Modern Day Ripoff” are as cranky and shambolic as forever-frisky Pop classics like “Raw Power” and “Five Foot One.” It also presents an interesting conundrum: the nature of cramming one’s mercurial musical past into one loud bomb-drop. The snaky, free-falling free jazz of 1970’s Funhouse (repped here with rabid aplomb by “Down on the Street” and “Loose”) and mid-’70s Sunset Strip soliloquies (“Death Trip,” “Sick of You”), therefore, must fuse into a flashy, fleshy entirety with Pop’s icy Sturm und Drang–y “Mass Production,” a Bo Diddley–esque “Lust for Life,” the hypnotic likes of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Nightclubbing,” and more—all without turning Iggy and his ruckus into a smoothed-over Las Vegas revue.
Luckily, the Montreux Jazz Fest production knobs at Stravinsky Hall (one of Iggy’s favorite places to play) were kept well beyond black, and into the red, for the live frizz necessary for any Pop show to explode. If you’re going to record a gig that covers most of the highlights of a long, mangy career such as Iggy Pop’s, this is the way to capture it.
