Iggy Pop - Skull Ring

I’m finding it hard to listen to this album. Not because of the tangible music, exactly, but because of its clash of polar opposites. On Skull Ring, Iggy Pop’s most recent solo venture, the Stooges reunite for four tracks and Sum 41 guests on the album’s first single. But there is something innately wrong that an album that also holds the first songs by the Stooges – a band that all but birthed punk as we know it – in 30 years sits alongside a song by Sum 41 – a band that greatly contributed to punk’s distillation into the realm of pop. Other than this protrusive, painful bit of irony, the album fairs rather poorly. The first cut on Skull Ring, “Little Electric Chair,” is also the album’s best track as the Stooges of yore show their skills: the song is satiated by raw slashes of guitar, primal drumming, danceable handclaps, and Iggy’s patented yelp. From there, Skull Ring basically beats the same formula into the remaining fifteen songs, all but killing the sound. Green Day and Peaches also guest on the album, along with Iggy’s longtime backing band, the Trolls, but it all starts to sound the same as this sonic archetype is still beast heard in the Stooges farewell full-length from 1973, Raw Power. Iggy, I still love you, but the past 30 years certainly has not treated you very well. [www.iggypop.com]