Every Loser – Iggy Pop (2023)

At first, Every Loser comes across as the musical equivalent of a David O. Russell movie: an attempt to use star power to overshadow how hollow the project is beyond a recognizable ensemble of people attached to it. Andrew Watt produces rock music soullessly, cluttering every audible moment with a cacophony of over-compressed guitars, synthesizers, and extraneous processing effects until the end result is stumbling over itself into an incoherent pile of distortion. It makes it so difficult to focus on anything that it becomes easy to forget that this is supposed to be an Iggy Pop record — that is, until an off-stage command to “Do the Raw Power thing again!” prompts a slew of inane punk-by-way-of-profanity (at its worst in “Neo Punk”: “Old ladies cum when I flash my junk”), Iggy audibly flailing in the background to play the part. When even this borderline excuse of an artistic vision is absent, the song bounces from genre to genre like a pachinko ball, eventually concluding with no clear aim to take away from the time you spent fruitlessly aiming to follow it, and that’s if you even cared to give it the benefit of the doubt after laughable lines like “I’m crispy on the outside, and juicy where I cry.” We’re supposed to be impressed that artists like Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard came together with other 20th century rock alumni to be a part of this overproduced bucket of sweat, yet everyone only ends up the worse for it. It’s the banal inverse of Post Pop Depression.

Upon further reflection on its cast of musical collaborators and presumed target audience (i.e. who is going to be excited by “featuring Dave Navarro” in 2023), Every Loser is the musical equivalent of an Expendables movie.

★