Iggy & the Stooges
Raw Power

THE REVIEW

I love The Stooges and their stage animal Iggy, anachronistic beings who manage to bring out everything that is inherent in Rock, an ancestral fire that resurrects passions at the expense of all the prepackaged musical piss we're forced to swallow today, while a flaccid society induces loser complexes and generates slaves...

After the half "commercial" flop FUNHOUSE, which in the years to come will stand to represent them instead as their best project despite a dissonant mass cognition; in '71 the new picture of bums is completed with the almost freshly graduated James Williamson.

Now try asking Iggy who the hell James was... perhaps the iguana will answer with a smile, remembering those damned bohemian days when we screwed our heads with anything, even if it was the dust from the ceiling cracks or the one on the TV, as long as it fit in a spoon, but that's another story and it hardly matters, because if at the time, the album in question surely did not intoxicate the masses nor the critics, today it remains the precursor of what would be the punk rock wave in the years to come.

The band changes lineup several times and finally stabilizes with the Asheton brothers, but this time Ron is relegated to bass to replace Dave Alexander (later mourned R.I.P.) for a more competent Williamson on guitar.
The group manages to find an "almost" equilibrium, if not mentally then at least musically, between the spartan sound wall of the Ashtons and the Californian one of Williamson, a combination that will allow, after annoying half the world, the production of the album in question in 1973: RAW POWER.
Dropped by Elektra, which sends them to hell with all their drug addiction, heroin on a roll; the friendship with a talented and rising Bowie will bring the outcomes for this new project of Iggy & The Stooges with Columbia Records, while Williamson handles all the guitar arrangements.

From the very first listens, you can immediately hear how the album suffers from the dull and flaccid mixing of Bowie's entourage, who perhaps thought they were still dealing with Ziggy Stardust, to the detriment of what Iggy himself wanted and was instead boycotted by MainMan Management, the agency with which Pop was under contract.

But this cannot chip away at the damned soul the album preserves; a strong psychedelic acid rock component, enough to resurrect the dead, listen to SEARCH AND DESTROY, left intact from Bowie's aspirations, and GIMMI DANGER, both precursors of the incendiary rock that still echoes today in the minds of its progeny.

Everything is a tone above with the abrasive YOU PRETTY FACE IS GOING TO HELL and the muffled and lewd PENETRATION, different from each other but linked by a vintage essence imbued with whiskey & cigarettes, while the guitar of a possessed Williamson scratches at the doors of a blackboard that screams its distortion capabilities, sharp as a razor on the jugular, merging into an audience made of continuous tensions.

Thus, throughout the project, comes to life a psychedelic bite to the balls, suffocated and claustrophobic, whose edges sharpened like knives seem to slice through everything that passes by.

And it is in these early stages that the new Stooges' monster reveals itself, reborn from the ashes and from a death, the real one or at least predicted, for Iggy & Co., which would have seen them all, at least the luckiest, in treatment for their excesses.
An antimatter of which the beast feeds, expands, violent and inhuman it breathes and thickens, greedy of those violent follies and of all the shit a man can generate in his feeble mind.
And now try asking him, Iggy, who the hell was James?...

Apart from the TITLE-TRACK, which seems anything but a statement of intent, driven by mediocre production and mixing choices.
I NEED SOMEBODY, even if the least Stooges-like of the album, dusts off from its boots the dirt of a long metropolitan path that burned thousands of liters of alcohol and cigarettes in the lysergic fumes of brothels and night bars where Williamson's nighttime follies seem to curse the moon.
But it is with SHAKE APPEAL and DEATH TRIP that the Detroit boys continue to poison themselves with a savage and brutal Hendrix-esque rock, while James "Skull" Williamson rages and doesn't stop screwing his death instrument supported by the thundering Ashtons, who now more than ever seem to want to bring down the ceiling.

After a few months of touring, the Stooges break up again in February 1974, due to the heroin addiction of the frontman.
The group's last performance will be captured on the album Metallic K.O. in 1976.