From Guardian.co.uk:

Iggy Pop finds French rebirth on Préliminaires

Iggy Pop's recent output has been laboriously retreading his glory years. But, inspired by Michel Houellebecq, his new album thrillingly bids farewell to the rock superstar persona.


Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty

It's 'boîte de nuit' … the new Frenchified Iggy chucks his beret out to the crowd. A couple of years ago, I penned a blog urging Iggy Pop to stop making records. The gist of it was this: I am a massive Pop fan and have been since my teens. His 1977 double whammy of The Idiot and Lust for Life are among my favourite albums of all time. But his recorded output has been going down for years. 2007's Stooges reunion album, The Weirdness, I believed, was the nadir of his career. I believed that, for the sake of his remaining reputation, Iggy had to stop making music.

He hasn't listened to me, and I'm glad, because Préliminaires – the album he releases this month, having just turned 62 – is one of the best things he's ever done. The problem with modern Iggy is that he's been stuck on "being Iggy" – trying to recreate his youthful, wilder self with increasingly bad metal. Not that he's alone in that, but either he's got sick of his imitators or sick of imitating himself.

"At one point I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music," he said recently, a prelude to a complete volte face wherein Iggy has stopped trying to rock.

Préliminaires is as extraordinary and radical an album as he has ever made. Gone are the sounds of sub-Stooges or dunderheaded punk, replaced by New Orleans street jazz, shades of Louis Armstrong, quieter overtones and the kind of music that played in smoky European bars in the 1940s. Iggy – God forbid – even sings some of it in French. There are tales of dead dogs, stale love and growing old. Some of it is playful (King of the Dogs); some of it is incredibly moving (He's Dead/She's Alive).

The story behind the album is this: on the lookout for "important fiction", Iggy came across a book called The Possibility of an Island by notorious French writer Michel Houellebecq. He took it to France and read it in three days at a lonely seaside hotel, and fell in love with it. Word must have got around, because a year later he found himself being asked to write some music for a film about the author and – like the contrarian of old – "just ignored the film and wrote music for the book". Holed up in a Miami riverside cabin, Iggy spent a year crafting the songs, "completely outside the modern music industry. Like Daniel, the book's protagonist, I too have grown weary of a career as an entertainer and wish for a new life," he says, pointedly.

Among the album's killer tracks are a sublime take on 1945 standard Les Feuilles Mortes (Autumn Leaves), and I Want To Go to the Beach, which has real vulnerability in lines about leaving the "superstar" behind. He's not totally ditched the Pop we know – Nice to Be Dead is the album's sole rocker, and Je Sais Que Tu Sais has a Glitter beat and sounds like Nightclubbing in Pigalle. But otherwise it's timeless, jazzy, brave, reeking of Gitanes and rebirth, with Pop's stunning mature baritone the best vocal he's delivered in years; an album to lose yourself in like a great book.

"It's the best I can do," offers Iggy, humbly, of his masterwork. The title, incidentally, translates as "Foreplay", suggesting there's more to come. If Pop can escape the straitjacket of "being Iggy" and come up with something as outstanding as Préliminaires, he simply must carry on making records.