Iggy Pop - 2023 - Rare Trax

Cleopatra – CLO3959  553.37MB FLAC

Rare Trax is a collection built from alternate mixes, outtakes, demos and later recordings rather than a conventional Iggy Pop album. Released by Cleopatra Records in 2023, it pulls material from several different periods of his career and places radically different versions of familiar songs beside recordings that never became part of the standard album canon. The result is uneven by design, but that is also the point. This is a record about the edges of the catalog.

The first four tracks come from The Idiot sessions: alternate mixes of “China Girl,” “Dum Dum Boys,” “Baby” and “Tiny Girls.” These songs are inseparable from Iggy Pop’s work with David Bowie in the mid-1970s, and hearing alternate mixes slightly changes the balance inside recordings that have become extremely familiar. Different instrumental details rise forward, vocals sit differently against the backing tracks, and the songs feel a little less fixed than the finished album versions.

The Party material works the same way. “It’s My Life” appears as an outtake, while “Bang Bang,” “Sea of Love” and “Time Won’t Let Me” are alternate mixes. Party is sometimes treated as a relatively minor Iggy Pop record, but these versions show how much studio decision-making sits behind even the rougher corners of his catalog. A different mix can make a song feel more skeletal, more aggressive or simply stranger.

“Lust for Life” and “The Passenger” appear as live mixes, bringing the collection back toward two of Iggy Pop’s most familiar songs. Their inclusion gives the disc a recognizable center before it moves into less predictable territory. From there, the Steve Jones demos become one of the most interesting sections: “Beside You,” “Cry for Love,” “Purple Haze” and “Warm Feeling.” These recordings place Iggy Pop beside the Sex Pistols guitarist in a looser developmental context, where the songs feel closer to workshop material than finished record-company product.

The cover of “Purple Haze” is especially revealing because Iggy does not approach Hendrix with reverence. The song is absorbed into his own blunt vocal style and the hard rock vocabulary surrounding the demo session. “Cry for Love,” meanwhile, connects more directly to material that would later become part of Blah-Blah-Blah, making the demo useful as a glimpse of a song before its final production identity was established.

The second half of the collection becomes increasingly miscellaneous. “Family Affair” brings Sly and the Family Stone into Iggy’s orbit, while “Fire Engine” appears in a Ministry mix. “Warrior Tribe” and “Old Mule Skinner” widen the stylistic range further before “I Wanna Be Your Dog” closes the collection in a Brains mix. By that point, Rare Trax has moved a long way from the Bowie-era alternate mixes that opened the disc.

That lack of chronological or stylistic purity is part of the appeal. The collection jumps between studio eras, collaborators and recording methods instead of trying to tell one clean story. Iggy Pop’s career has always been unusually elastic, moving through proto-punk, art rock, hard rock, electronic production, pop songwriting and various forms of studio experimentation. Rare Trax treats that instability as the organizing principle.

The booklet leans heavily into archival detail. The interior is packed with liner notes discussing sessions, collaborators and alternate versions, while the outer design is stark black and white with a shirtless photograph of Iggy on the front. The disc repeats the same dark visual language. This Oakland Public Library copy carries the library barcode and disc labels directly over the original packaging, but most of the design remains visible.

Rare Trax is not the place to start with Iggy Pop. It makes more sense after the major records are already familiar, because much of its value comes from hearing what changed around known songs and from placing unfinished or alternate material beside the finished mythology. It is less a greatest-hits collection than a drawer full of alternate routes.

—ChatGPT