One of the key rules of rock & roll is there are some artists you can never count out -- no matter how many lame records they may make, no matter how misguided their career direction might seem, they always hold the promise that they'll jump back in the loop and deliver the goods again.
Iggy Pop delivered a solid one-two punch (for the first time in a while) with
Brick by Brick and
American Caesar in 1990 and 1993, but after ten years and three major duds in a row (the uninspired
Naughty Little Doggie and the strikingly faulty
Avenue B and
Beat 'Em Up), you just had to wonder if maybe the World's Forgotten Boy had finally lost the magic touch for good. Of course,
Iggy's career had always offered plenty of opportunities for such thinking, and just as he had in the past,
Iggy came back to shut down the disbelievers with a solid slice of prime rock & roll called
Skull Ring. The big news is that, on four cuts,
Skull Ring marks
Pop's first studio collaboration with
the Stooges since
Raw Power in 1973, and thankfully
Ron Asheton's gloriously primal guitar riffs sound as brilliant as ever, and mix with
Iggy's bestial wail like gin and tonic; if "Little Electric Chair" and "Skull Ring" don't quite pick up where
Fun House left off, they make it clear the monster that is
the Stooges can still shake the Earth when they have a notion. If the rest of
Skull Ring doesn't quite reach the same level of solar plexus impact as the
Stooges cuts,
Iggy flies high enough on the rock juice that this set blasts like an M-80 from start to finish;
Iggy's road band,
the Trolls, redeem themselves after their cringe-worthy debut on
Beat 'Em Up, electro-punk diva
Peaches proves she's just libidinous enough to keep up with
Iggy (and they goad one another into truly glorious rudeness),
Green Day back the godfather of punk with spunk, enthusiasm, and lots of energy, and even
Sum 41 give as good as they get (which is a lot more than you might expect from them).
Skull Ring doesn't always capture
Iggy at his best as a lyricist, but here what he says isn't half as important as how he says it, and he hasn't sounded this right -- and had music this potent backing him up -- in a decade, and the result is a big, sweaty, high-octane rock & roll session from a guy who practically defined the form. Like I said, you can't ever count
Iggy out, and
Skull Ring demonstrates why.