Iggy really turned things around with this album. Musically, it havers between mildly generic alt-rock turf and mildly generic pop-punk, but it does the job and is more convincing than, say, the metal-by-numbers job offered up on Instinct, and when you combine that with Iggy's best vocal performance and freshest set of lyrics in years you get something really special. Only occasionally getting flat-out angry, Iggy offers a more varied set of moods than usual on here, with a recurring theme of squaring your jaw and getting on with life despite all it's done to you (see I Won't Crap Out, Brick By Brick, Livin' On the Edge of the Night, The Undefeated, and hell, pretty much most of the album). It's Iggy Pop's life-affirming therapeutic album, and it sounds much better than you might expect from that description.