The Stooges Reviewed

The Stooges

The Weirdness (Virgin)

Last year's outstanding New York Dolls album proved that improbable comebacks don't necessarily have to reek of warm mothballs. That lesson was apparently lost on the Stooges. While Ann Arbor, Mich.'s finest never actually embarrass themselves with their first studio album in 33 years, much of The Weirdness exudes the same sloppy halfheartedness as Iggy Pop's least satisfying solo efforts (Party, anyone?). The return of guitarist Ron Asheton and drummer Scott Asheton alongside the great Mike Watt on bass and Steve Albini on knobs should've yielded something better than mere middling. Even so, The Weirdness has its moments of redemption. "My Idea of Fun" pits Ron Asheton's scalding guitar fuzz bath against Pop's catchy seventh-grade refrain about killing everyone. Ditto for "The End of Christianity," a full-press rocker that turns a simple glimpse of a short-shorted pizza-joint goddess into the downfall of the world's most popular religion. By contrast, tracks like "You Can't Have Friends" and "Free and Freaky" do little more than conjure up the superficial Stooges aesthetic before plodding onward minus the angry energy and wild sense of adventure that characterized their best work. This is not the sound of a band with anything on the line.