The haziness of Free has its share of frustrations-as alluring as the pensive soundscapes are, it’s hard not to wish they were occasionally more sculpted-but there’s something curiously human and appealing about its ungainly nature. Often, the lyrics are as skeletal and suggestive as the music, lending Free a certain spectral quality the album threatens to come into focus but resolutely resists to offer anything more concrete than whispers and suggestions. Every element, whether electronic rhythms or swells of keyboard or stabs of a trumpet, is used as texture, letting Iggy savor the words he recites and croons. Free runs a mere 34 minutes but it meanders, lingering in shimmering twilight vistas, luxuriating in reverb and gaining a bit of momentum when the bass line of “James Bond” nods at spy movies. That yearning isn’t especially urgent, however. It’s odd to think that the author of “Cock in My Pocket” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” balked at the line “Just because I like big tits/Doesn’t mean I like big dicks,” but the song isn’t meant to be kinky or titillating it’s tired, enervated by the onslaught of cheap online sex and, in that sense, it fits the rest of Free, which is filled with songs where the narrator yearns to be anywhere other than where he is at the moment. The closest Free gets to the carnal is “Dirty Sanchez,” a Thomas-written screed against online sexuality that Pop had to be persuaded to record.
Thomas and Noveller both make a conscious decision to appeal to the parts of Pop that lie above the waist, writing songs that address matters of the head, heart, and soul. Hiring the pair to tap into this dusky, brooding vibe, Pop gave them a pair of poems to act as a lodestar for their compositions-Lou Reed’s “We Are the People,” Dylan Thomas’ middle-school prerequisite “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”-and then sat back, collaborating on occasion but otherwise performing songs handed to him. Pop happened upon them both as he was searching for music to play on his regular BBC Radio show and within their music, he recognized a moody elasticity that suits his flights of introspection. It’s a guided meditation, directed by Leron Thomas, a jazz trumpeter from Houston, and Noveller, the stage name of the Brooklyn-based musician Sarah Lipstate, who specializes in “guitarscapes.” Neither Thomas nor Noveller are particularly well-known. It’s merely another iteration of the divide between Iggy Pop and Jim Osterberg: Homme brought out the rocker, while Free allows Osterberg to turn inward and meditate. It’s such a departure from Post Pop Depression that it nearly feels like a repudiation, yet that isn’t quite true.
It was, to use a phrase Pop coined himself, “a rock album with popular punks,” the snide explanation he gave for his record company rejecting his Francophile 2012 album Après.įree belongs to the same lineage as Après and Préliminaires, the 2009 album where Iggy returned to his jazzy arthouse inspirations. A clever fusion of the gnarled fuzz of the Stooges and the arch artiness of Pop’s ’70s Berlin collaborations with David Bowie, Post Pop Depression sounded like an Iggy Pop album was supposed to sound like. In its liner notes, Iggy admits “this is an album in which other artists speak for me, but I lend my voice,” and that he consented to this peculiar situation because he felt “drained” at the conclusion of the cycle for Post Pop Depression, his 2016 collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme. Free finds Iggy Pop embracing the notion that he’s playing Iggy Pop.
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