Iggy Pop Instinct

This ablum is as close Iggy has ever come to "heavy metal". For the price it is well worth the money. It simply rocks harder than anything Iggy has done since the 70's. Several tracks are co-written with former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and actually sound like Jone's most current band, Neurotic Outsiders, with Iggy on vocals. A welcome addition to any Iggy collection.

At this writing there are about a dozen "best-of" collections on the market of Iggy Pop's major-label work, and until someone compiles one more comprehensive than 2005's A Million in Prizes: The Anthology, there is no need to release another. Does everyone understand this? While there are already a bunch of dodgy collections of Iggy's music out there, 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection has the very serious drawback of having been drawn primarily from Pop's recordings for A&M Records.

At 52 years of age, Iggy Pop was on tour in Europe promoting his Avenue B album in December 1999 when he performed the concert presented here as Live at the Avenue B. That's actually "Live @ the A venue B," as the credits put it, or at the AB venue, i.e., the Ancienne Belgique Theatre in Brussels, Belgium. In a set lasting nearly 90 minutes, Pop and his four-piece backup band, usually known as the Trolls, run through some Avenue B material, some of it spoken word, with the singer sitting on the stage floor and strumming an acoustic guitar, along with selected tunes from earlier albums such as The Stooges, Raw Power, Lust for Life, Blah Blah Blah, Instinct, and Brick by Brick, and rock & roll standards like "Shakin' All Over" and the show-closing "Louie, Louie." (The Kingsmen's hit version of the latter might not have had the dirty lyrics everybody thought it did, but Pop's rendition certainly does.) …