Avenue B

"It was in the winter of my 50th year when it hit me: I was really alone, and there wasn't a hell of a lot of time left. Every laugh and touch that I could get became more important. Strangely, I became more bookish, and my home and study meant more to me as I considered the circumstances of my death. I wanted to find a balance between joy and dignity on my way out. Above all, I didn't wanna take any more shit, not from anybody."

THESE WORDS are taken not from the translation of some dusty tome by an obscure and starving Soviet author, but 'No Shit', the opening track off Iggy Pop's 18th album. The Body's back and he's bad: not superfly bad, not idiot savant nor noble savage bad, but bad like Dostoevsky, like Louis-Ferdinand Celine, like Henry Miller. In a way, it's not really the latest Iggy record at all, but the debut by one Jim Osterberg. The gloves and the masks are off - Avenue B slow-burns with a profane, unspeakable honesty.

There's a chill that runs up your spine when somebody tells you their foulest truth, a voyeuristic shiver of excitement tempered by mortification - this bloodletting always hurts a little. And while Iggy's made some bold statements over the last decade, on mercurial but mixed works like Brick By Brick and American Caesar, those records still played on persona. Here, educated by Frank Sinatra and Julie London, he's found a new voice, one that emanates from the pit of his scarred gut, the testimony of a lonely, middle-aged, compassionate, detached, sometimes cruel human being.

This album's concluding track, the unflinching self-portrait 'Facade', provides the defining image: Iggy's lounging in his gown, reading a story some guy's written about him, wanting to "stuff it down the author's throat", thriving on the freedom of being a new divorcee, gnawed to his bones by a creeping isolation, his life becomes a regime of reading, writing and fucking strangers then politely bidding them goodbye in the morning. For the most part, it's a brutally quiet collection, made by a man whose very name has become a byword for wildness, now coming to terms with his own awful fallibility.

The arrangements are mostly sparse, skeletal, even sepulchral: broken conga lines, acoustic guitar, slide, shambling rhythms, a careworn blues. Mind you, there are moments where the Ig chooses to not so much rock out as amplify the bile - that old chestnut 'Shakin' All Over' reads love as a psychotic reaction, while the monkey-funk of 'Corruption' snapshots Pop eating his own heart out and vomiting it up again: "Corruption rules my soul/Corruption chills my bones".

So, Avenue B is a record covered in lesions, cuts, and weeping sores. Look at the titles: 'Nazi Girlfriend' ("I wanna fuck her on the floor/Among my books of ancient lore"), 'She Called Me Daddy' - listening to the latter track is like watching a man rearranging his own psyche with a rusty razor. Iggy repeatedly subjects himself and his ex-lover to a scrutiny that violates the sanctity of their private life. He confesses to being ashamed by her weakness for Cosmopolitan and trashy TV shows, then chides himself for not being proud of her anyway.

Avenue B documents the loneliness of the long distance looper, it tells story of a man who has thrived on the illusion of immortality, but can now see the wraith-shape of his own demise riding over the skyline. "Hurting and recycling people over and over again/How much longer?/How many more?" he muses at one point, examining the scum that makes up much of the human condition, and celebrating it.