Iggy Pop - Lust For Life - Review
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critics' view

Just five months after “The Idiot” the Iggy Pop / David Bowie partnership delivered a second ’77 LP with “Lust For Life”, issued in August. The album is wholly different from the preceding set, deliberately recorded in a spontaneous, improvised manner, with a beat that was crunchier, rockier, livelier and much more immediate. Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy, “Lust For Life” comes bursting in with a killer rhythm section shamelessly ripping into the Motown vaults to misappropriate “You Can’t Hurry Love”. It’s a cheeky raid with a massive bounty. The ace rhythm section provided by the Sales brothers (Tony on bass and Hunt on drums) strike gold again with “The Passenger” – a hundred bands could attempt to play this and very few would equal the majesty of Iggy and his crew here. Here, our man sings of the night time, the rock n rollers time: “Get into the car, we'll be the passenger, we'll see the stars that shine so bright, stars made for us tonight, and everything is made for you and me”. It all sounds so glam – but underneath a certain sense of loneliness lurks. Iggy is dreaming of riches on “Success”, a good fun rocker which goofs around in a Zappa-esque manner, with the Sales Brothers stepping up to the mic to holler back refrains at Iggy who seems to be improvising as he tricks them into shouting back “Oh Shit” by the end, which cracks me up every time. Well, at least it did the first three times anyway, and still does as long as a few years have passed since I last heard it. Closing the album, “Fall In Love With Me” sounds like the embryo for Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up”, and cements the deal on what has been a very fine offering from our man.

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