David Bowie
“Whatever he is, he isn’t human.” – Capn Marvel
“People say he's always smartly dressed but when he stayed
with me he didn't change his clothes for four days. As a matter of fact I'm wearing his scarf at
the moment. Filthy, isn't it?” – Marc
Bolan
“He always found it difficult relating to regular people.”
– Mick Ronson
Albums Reviewed:
The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars
Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture Soundtrack
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)
David Bowie
is the anti-Bob Dylan. And sure, this is
coming from the mind of a self-professed Dylan maniac who probably wants to
relate everything in music history to the man somehow, but hear me out. When I say he’s the anti-Bob Dylan, I don’t
mean in every conceivable way. That would
mean David’s a horrible songwriter and completely bereft artistically and basically
one of the lamest human beings to ever pick up a guitar. This is obviously not true. In some
areas, though, I think the comparison is pretty apt. First of all, David’s British and Bob’s
American. As these are the only two
countries that have ever produced any music of note, this is an important
difference (Fun facts: Neil Young is actually from
Anyway, the
total zig-zag nature of
And that’s really what he is as an artist: sporadic. His inability to stick with one style and over-eagerness to find whatever the next new hotness was meant that, as soon as he stumbled onto something that worked, he usually abandoned it within a few years for something that didn’t. He has about three or four albums I’d characterize as “great” (all of which are still flawed enough to miss out on a perfect score), a bunch I’d call “good” or “very good,” and a whole fuckload that range from “decent” to “inconsistent” to “mediocre” to “bad” to “this album makes me hate all music.” A lot of his individual songs are fantastic, but only rarely does he carry the kind of momentum of a “Heroes” or “Suffragette City” through a large chunk of an album (though, oddly, those two songs come from records where he manages to do exactly that), and he’s able to carry such momentum through an entire record exactly zero times. His songwriting skills are good, but not amazing, and methinks that much of his best material owes a lot to working with talented collaborators (Mick Ronson, Carlos Alomar, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, etc.). His voice is sometimes too high and warbly, and sometimes too self-consciously croony, and never really able to do that well with genuine emotion (due to his being a poser and all), but it sounds decent, I guess (and certainly better than that castrated Canadian elf I always refer to on every new artist page). An unfortunate strike against him is that he had to change his name to avoid being confused with a Monkee. Also, his left eye is fucked up (no, that’s not a contact lens in the picture above).
In spite of all this, though, I do like the guy. He did produce a lot of good (and extremely diverse) material in his lifetime, and even his weaker albums (except for the handful of records that make up his extremely distasteful “dregs”) either have a few winners on them or are at least interesting. Plus, he judged the walk-off in Zoolander, which was pretty awesome, so more power to him for that.
And, onto the reviews!
PS: Hey kids, don’t do cocaine!
PPS: Hey kids, don’t have gay sex with Mick Jagger!
Shannon Carey (caresm6@wfu.edu) writes:
Over the last couple of days
I’ve been thinking a lot about your
The way that you feel about Dylan? That’s how I feel about
In contrast, David Bowie is easily in my top 5 artists ever and I listen to him
kind of obsessively. Like you, many
As for his “poseur” qualities. Honestly, I don’t give a shit! Heh. He wears his
personae like costumes and, in the process, is simply one of the coolest human
beings ever. He has a quality to him—the otherworldliness that Capn Marvel
noted—that is immediately apparent. His oddness and his chameleonic
restlessness are totally unique on the music scene. So what if he never
invented a genre? He invented and reinvented /himself /on a regular basis.
That’s kind of what makes him so bad-ass. He’s also one of the art-rock
godfathers (along with Eno, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Kraftwerk) who basically set
the tone and provided the guide for /all /the underground and experimental
music that followed them. I honestly think
Also, for the purpose of writing something from the perspective of a hardcore
Bowie fan for you to put up on his page, here’s a short list of some of his
major assets as I see them:
*Dr Drama: *I honestly don’t think a Bowie song can be overwrought or
over-the-top or any other similar adjectives.
2. *His Voice:* You aren’t a fan of his voice it appears, but I certainly am. I
like what you said about Dylan on his page. He “vocalizes.” They both do that:
take what they were given (i.e. not a traditionally “great” voice) and /work
with it/. Just as a Dylan song isn’t quite the same without Bob confidently
ripping through them (a great example is “From a Buick 6,” which I love
enormously /because/ of the vocals),
3. *Songwriting: *A musical artist is nothing if they can’t write a song but
it’s important to point it out when it comes to Bowie because sometimes folks
get so caught up on the “image” and iconography of the man that they forget to
mention that the man is a terrific songwriter. He’s got an amazing knack for
melodies and hooks, he’s able to make songs that are odd/quirky/even
avant-garde without sacrificing quality and accessibility and his lyrics are
always underrated. Plus, I think there’s a real continuity to his work. Whether
it’s on /Ziggy/ or /Low, /a kick-ass rocker or a big ballad…it always sounds
like
4. *Oddness:* David Bowie is fucking weird. It’s one of the best things about
him. There’s an off-kilter quality to even his most easily likeable albums
(like /Hunky Dory/). The restless creativity and intrigue of his music just knocks
me around a bit. He’s always a surprise, even when you know the songs by heart.
It’s this oddness that leads to his incredible aesthetic of cool.
I don’t really include his albums from /Tonight/ through /Hours/ in any of
this. I’ve heard them all a couple of times and they range from absolutely
horrendous to mildly interesting but you of all people should know how easy it
is to loathe more than a decade of an artist’s work and still absolutely
worship them. :-) However, I do think that both /Heathen/ and /Reality/ are
wonderful, wonderful albums and I listen to and love them right alongside the
‘70s classics. I’ll close this incredibly long email out with my grades for the
Bowie albums that matter:
*10: *Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station, Low, “Heroes” (4)
*9: * Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, Heathen (3)
*8: *Lodger*, *Scary Monsters, Reality (3)
*7: *The Man Who Sold the World, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans (3)
*6: *Space Oddity, Pin Ups (2)
Plus I have a playlist including “Let’s Dance,” “Modern Love,” “China Girl,”
“Blue Jean,” “Under Pressure,” “I’m Afraid of Americans, “This is Not America”
and the (fantastic) BBC cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man.” I’d give that
playlist a *9*.
This is really long and it probably goes around and around in circles, but I
really wanted to write something in to give the perspective of someone who
really loves David Bowie. I suppose I can see all the reasons why someone
wouldn’t like him but that’s just not me! I find his music wickedly fun,
decadently sexy and utterly captivating. He's been a part of my life since
before I was born. My parents got married in 1983. "Modern Love" came
on the radio while my dad was driving to the ceremony. Talk about apt!
Early On (1964-1966) (1991)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Baby
Loves That Way”
Sometimes funny but mostly just bad collection of early (failed) singles and B-sides from our favorite artist (still known at this point as Davy Jones) and several bands he apparently fronted when he sucked (The King Bees! The Manish Boys! The Lower Third! They all blow!). I know I’m not the first person to make this point about this album, but when a man’s entire modus operandi consists of stealing other people’s sounds, and when he blows at writing songs and hasn’t learned how to rip off other people’s ideas well yet…well, what do you think this stuff is gonna sound like? The man didn’t even make a decent album until 1970! And here we are in 1964. Come on. You know this thing sucks. I don’t need to tell you it sucks. There is no way in hell it doesn’t suck. How much does it suck, though? Because, really, that’s the only pertinent question here.
The answer
is, surprisingly…not all that
much. Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not bad in
an offensive way (like, for instance, his next album). Most of it just sounds like C-level
completely mediocre garage nuggets from the mid-60’s…which, of course, is
exactly what most of the album is.
Instead of putting his own “
Moving on, the chronological sequence of everything just makes it more ridiculous. Davy moves from simple 2-minute dumb garage rock to crap heavy blues to crap twee pop to a trio of horridly recorded (and still crap) “sensitive” acoustic balladeer songs to a pop-rock song that sounds like a Who D-side (complete with noise feedback section! Because that’s what the Who did, right? They had noise feedback sections!) without even blinking. It’s like tracing the history of mid-sixties rock through the eyes of a guy who sucks at all types of it. Things get a little better in the 2nd half, as some better-produced Beatle-ripoff pop-rock songs that actually have some semblance of a melody come along and are tolerable in their mediocrity. “Baby Loves that Way” has an especially annoyingly catchy melody and even a guitar solo a large number of my friends could probably play in 5 minutes! I kinda like it, though. It’s fun.
The last third of the album shifts away from guitar rock into more fey, British dancehall types of music. This, of course, is about as surprising as Roger Clemens’ being a steroid abuser given the British dancehall movement of 1966 led by bands like the Rolling Stones, who produced such lovely albums as Between the Buttons, which is much better than “Do Anything You Say.” At least Bowie starts using a voice that sounds like the classic Bowie voice we all know and tolerate instead of trying to rip off the vocal styles of the bands he was ripping off (I forgot to mention that! It’s pretty funny). The last two songs both use that percussion instrument where you drag a stick along the side of the cone thing with all the ridges on it. I don’t remember what it’s called. It must have been “hot” for a month in 1966. Neither one of these songs is very good.
This album
is interesting from a historical perspective because
David Bowie (1967)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Uncle
Arthur”
David’s debut album and the first thing he released as “David Bowie” is an embarrassing and ridiculous pile of ass that David didn’t match in badness again until the eighties. The stuff collected on Early On was at least passable in places and never, like, killed anyone. This is just atrocious. It’s so over-the-top in its wannabe British dancehall Kinks/Between the Buttons-ness (but with lyrics that sound like a random amalgamation of semi-freaky Syd Barrett-esque put-ons, like those packs of refrigerator magnets where you can make your very own sentences that make no sense whatsoever) that it’s pretty much sickening. I’d probably question the entire musical taste of anyone who finds a lot to enjoy in it. So no, David’s still not very good.
There is literally not a single thing on this album worth hearing. It gets a 3 because it’s actually kind of funny. If I wanted to raise its rating up any more it’d have to shoot up all the way to a 7 and become the latest example of my groundbreaking Tormato Corollary, but, alas, it’s so bad that somehow its badness completely overrides its comedy. Musically, it consists of weak, sort-of-jazzy-but-not-really-drums, strings playing whatever they feel like because it’s clear not much coherent was actually written for them, tinkly pianos not being catchy and/or keyboards not being un-shitty, and a bunch of horns (and by “horns,” I do not mean “saxophones” or “a horn section” or something that actually makes sense in a rock song; no, I mean a random trumpet or tuba or trombone) blasting away at melodies that generally fall into one of two categories: “dickless” or “off-key” (actually, usually both). Together, it all adds up to a bunch of ultra-fey, way-too-British, pseudo-psychedelic, croon-filled orchestral tinkly dancehall crap with occasional “weird” or “controversial” Bowie things that just suck at an unbelievably high level. Like “We are Hungry Men,” where the German voiceover guy goes “Achtung, Achtung! These are your orders! Anyone found guilty of consuming more than their allotted amount of air will be slaughtered and cremated!” before he’s interrupted by David’s going “I’ve prepared a document! Legalizing mass-abortion!” while a trumpet or something plays a note purposely way off-key. Ooohh! He said “abortion!” He’s being controversial! He’s dark and disturbed! Oooh!
No. It’s fucking retarded, especially when the
rest of the song (and album) is such a bunch of ass-poor music-hall nothingness
that sucks. Every reviewer that slams
this album does what I’m about to do, but fuck it, there’s no way to
effectively slam this album without
doing this, so here we go: look at some of these damn song titles! “Sell Me a Coat.” “This is a
It’s unclear whether I’ve nominated “Uncle Arthur” as best song a) because it’s the best (read: least actively annoying) or b) because it happens to come first and the annoyance hasn’t really gotten to me yet. Perhaps it’s just that a) is true because of b). Who knows. I don’t especially hate it. At least it has a melody, sort of, and a bit less gloppiness than, say, “Silly Boy Blue” (otherwise known as “SILLY BOY BLUUUUUUUUUE!!!!!!!!!!!”). Whatever. It doesn’t matter. This album is very, very bad. Don’t buy it. It’s kinda funny and occasionally it’s ridiculous in a way that’s not entirely horrendous, but that’s as much “praise” as I’m willing to give it. As with the stuff on Early On, if someone’s entire m.o. is ripping other people off, but he can’t write songs and hasn’t figured out how to rip people off well yet, then there’s just no way his material is going to be good. Plus, this record gives you the added bonus of being completely nauseating in addition to not having good songs on it. Brilliant. At this point my money would have still been on the Davy Jones who didn’t have to change his name to avoid confusion.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
For some odd reason, it
didn't occur to me until I read your review that this album really is a piece
of shit that probably deserves to be ranked with the It's Hard's and Cut the
Crap's and Manifesto's of the world. The most upfront problem with it is that
it's melodically retarded to an astonishing degree. Every reviewer seems to
make sure they mention how
In addition to that (pretty damn big) problem, the lyrics are usually fairly
awful, Bowie's singing just plain sucks, and both of those things are so British
cutesy music-hall that it annoys even an Anglophile like me.
But, for one reason or another, the album just doesn't strike me as being
as terrible as the aforementioned "terrible album" examples for
me to give it anything in the 1-3 range, so I'll go with a 4 instead.
Space Oddity (1969)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Space
Oddity”
An odd duck of an album released
originally in 1969 in the UK as David
Bowie (an interesting decision considering he’d already released an album
called David Bowie two years earlier)
and in the US as Man of Words/Man of
Music, then re-released in the US again in 1972 as Space Oddity (after deleting the sub-one minute track “(Don’t Sit
Down)” from side one for reasons unknown that were probably exceedingly silly)
because that’s the only song on it anyone knew of or cared about, and known
henceforth as such. The cover above is
the cover of the 1999 CD release and none of the various releases in 1969 or
1972 (I’ve seen two others, both of which also feature a stoned David with that
same teased-out white man’s afro haircut), but it’s the one the All Music Guide
uses, and that’s where I get all my album cover photos, so that’s the one I’ve
chosen to paste above. All of this
introductory nonsense would be far more interesting if the album in question
was any good, but unfortunately we’re not into the seventies yet, which means
For about five minutes, though, you’ll think you’re hearing the man suddenly transformed into the world-famous cultural icon/walk-off judge he eventually became because “oh, it’s that Major Tom song!” No, “Space Oddity” was not recorded anywhere near the time when Bowie recorded all of his early seventies classics, but in fact represents a completely out-of-place, several-years-too-early Great (with a capital G) song recorded by Mr. Bowie way back in 1968, or just one year removed from the shitstain that is David Bowie (I mean the 1967 lounge dancehall frilly white shirt cringe-inducing one, not the 1969 wannabe-psychedelic hippie acoustic mediocre one I’m reviewing right now). To put the relative goodness of “Space Oddity” as compared to the rest of the material David was producing at this point in perspective, this would be like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ randomly placing “Give it Away” on one of their crap white man’s funk albums from the mid-eighties or Green Day’s placing “American Idiot” on Kerplunk. I would have more examples for you (including examples of bands far better than the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day) were it not for the fact that the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, etc. were actually quite good right off the bat. They didn’t take seven or eight years to release a good album like Mr. Bowie, so they are able to provide no such parallel. Of course, they also didn’t have to change their name to avoid being confused with a member of the Monkees, so perhaps we’re expecting too much from David here.
Outside of the justifiably overplayed title track, there are indeed slim pickings to be found. I for one enjoy the sloppy-rockin’ good timer “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed,” but it’s probably not a good sign when the clear-cut nominee for second-best song on the album is a six and a half minute song that stops presenting new ideas somewhere around minute two. The rest consists of acoustic ballad-y pop songs that run the gamut from maybe-sorta-OK (if I’m in a good mood) to crap, overwrought excursions in sucking out loud, and a few songs that I still look at and remember not one thing about despite having listened to this album upwards of twenty times. The best of the bunch is probably “Janine,” which has a semi-catchy chorus and an electric guitar line that sounds pretty good, but I’m pretty sure a lot of other people around this time could write songs like this. Perhaps “God Knows I’m Good” can be classified as “eh, not that bad,” but I’m completely unconvinced by the base-skill-level acoustic strumming throughout (not an uncommon criticism for this album), and the chorus is repetitive in an actively annoying way as opposed to a semi-catchy way. You know “Space Oddity,” “Unwashed” and “Janine” are the only songs on here with any audible electric guitar in them? I may be forgetting a lick somewhere in minute seven of “Cygnet Committee” that’s completely hidden by the rest of that huge ball of suck, but, seriously, what the hell? I’m not saying a song needs to have an electric guitar in it to be good, but if you want to toss out such sissy, ball-less hippie acoustic balladeering, you should at least make sure you’ve moved past chapter 2 of the “how to play the acoustic guitar” instruction booklet, you know? Outside of “Space Oddity” and “Unwashed,” the songs just sit there in their flaccidness, and when David needs to work up a lather he has to resort to some other means even less forceful than his principal instrument, like the flute in “An Occasional Dream” or an entire fucking orchestra set to maximum “glop” in the hideous “Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud.” To give these songs credit, at least I remember something about them. By contrast, “Letter to Hermione” might as well not even exist.
The worst offender, however, is the aforementioned “Cygnet Committee,” which manages the trick of filling up ten minutes without coming up with one discernable melody, a coherent structure, or a single interesting musical idea. It just keeps going. Then at the end David appears very worked-up about something and the drums switch to march-time and David yells “I want to believe!!!” I’m sure this was meant to be a crushing, well, something, but not a single second of it works. David’s still crap voice doesn’t help, either – it’s no fun listening to him attempt to create something memorable despite a lack of any melody whatsoever by trying way too hard and over-emoting on every single line. I should also comment on how the closer “Memory of a Free Festival” follows several minutes of a church organ (?) doing nothing under David’s singing lyrics with no melody badly before a bunch of random sounds leads into what appears to be a completely different song featuring the repeated line “The sun machine is comin’ down and we’re gonna have a party!” and nothing else. This line is backed up by a chorus that sounds not unlike the one from “Hey Jude,” and the song’s full length is roughly seven and one quarter minutes. I have no further comment.
Also,
please stop the album once the “Hey Jude” chorus fades out. A minute later some weird buzzing sound about
ten times louder than the album itself comes in on my mp3. It’s the stupidest fucking thing
In
conclusion, “Space Oddity” is awesome, “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed”
is fun but too long, and maybe one or two others are passably OK. The rest can go fuck itself, though. No,
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
First I'd like to point out
that in my The Man Who Sold the World comment I used the word
"still" twice in one sentence (within like 5 words of each other),
and then in my Hunky Dory comment did the same thing but with the word
"goodness". Just wanted to point that out. I mean, honestly, I should
proof-read every once in a while..."the overlooked dark acoustic goodness
of Andy Warhol...melt(s) my face off with poppy goodness"...what the hell
is that?
You tell me.
Where was I? Oh, Space Oddity. This is one of those albums that should just
have a "6/10" or so stamped on it, since that's what everyone in the
world has agreed that's it worth. Me though? While I can see all the problems
and acknowledge all the flaws that people point out, I think it's PRETTY DARN
GREAT.
Granted, I realize that had I come to this album later in my music-listening
career I might have given it the classic critical rundown and liked it a lot
less, because it has a lot of those hot-button flaws that "serious"
music listeners are supposed to despise:
1. Samey arrangements and melodies all based around rather bland acoustic
strumming.
2. David Bowie's warbly singing.
3. "Emotion over melody" whiners like "Letter to
Hermione"
4. Hippie ballads like "An Occasional Dream"
...and so on. However, having first heard the album as a relatively unbiased
young lad, unbothered by any of those things, I STUPIDLY decided to just
take it for what it is and enjoy it. Thank God I know better than to do such a
thing now.
Anyway, sarcasm aside, the basic track rundown:
Space Oddity - Really needs no comment. Major classic, one of
the man's all time best, always will be, yada yada.
Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed - Overlooked gem? I
think so. Maybe it rambles on a minute or two too long, but I really don't see
what the big deal is about a couple minutes of enjoyable jamming. This one even
has a pretty good chorus, yes sir.
Letter to Hermione - A song that I can completely understand
everyone else hating since it's a broken-hearted acoustic song with absolutely
no memorability at all. Personally, I think
Cygnet Committee - Also falls into the "I completely
understand why everybody hates it" boat, also enjoyed by me anyway. Maybe
it's just me, but I find this 9 minute bunch of nonsensical rambling to be
quite entertaining...and it's "I WANT TO LIVE!"..."I WANT TO
BELIEVE!" would just be ridiculous *cough*
Janine - Now this is probably the truly overlooked, there's
absolutely no real reason to hate this track of the album, in my opinion. I
love this song so much that I would once pick it over the title track as my
favorite here, and even though I don't know what the hell was wrong with me
then, I still love it. It's just a simple, unpretentious catchy country-rocker
with interesting lyrics and vocals from Mr. Bowie. What's not to like?
An Occasional Dream - If you get past the obvious urge to hate
such a hippie-dippy ballad, it's a pretty great one, with
The Last 3 Songs - All suck, unfortunately. "God Knows
I'm Good" is interesting lyrically, but has nothing in the way of
catchiness, and the last two songs are respectively a ridiculous Disney
bullshit ballad and an equally ridiculous piece of dated hippie trash.
But I enjoy the first 6 tracks here enough that I would give this album an 8/10
no problem. Just stop looking at things from the "critical"
perspective and I think it's a pretty enjoyable album.
The Man Who Sold The World (1970)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “The Man
Who Sold The World”
The good news here is that
See, the
problem with this thing is that Bowie has decided to go dark and rawk and
abandon the whole hippie acoustic flower-power bullshit vibe that he was
sporting around so unconvincingly on the last album, and he hires Mick Ronson
to play lead guitar because it’s not like he’s any good at that…but he doesn’t
really know how to do all this yet. It’s
certainly the best
Sometimes it seems like David figured if he got an electric guitar player, mixed the bass really loud, and sang about gay sex and “gooks,” well, that’s all he needed to do to make a good, dark rock album. This is especially egregious on the horrendous misfire “She Shook Me Cold,” which literally has nothing else (even the Ronson guitar solo is buried by the bass line), and whose main riff sometimes sounds just like the one from “Width of a Circle,” only slower and much worse. “All the Madmen” is similarly lethargic, and it also counteracts a pretty decent chorus (“I’d rather stay here…with all the madmen…”) with a ridiculous “freaky child fairytale” section in the middle which features David doing some particularly poor pseudo-narration. In addition, the synth part near the end just seems tacked on for no good reason. It simply doesn’t fit, like David had no idea how to use keyboards effectively but figured a lot of rock records around 1970 had them so, you know, he should have them too (it seems he realized his need to bring someone in who knew what he was doing with such instruments on his next album, though, so I suppose give him credit there). “Saviour Machine” also takes a half-decent tune and tosses it down into synth hell at the end. These keyboards sound like ass! You can’t have this dark, sludgy rock album with exceptionally loud bass and then just hire some jackass to play a couple moron-simple tooty synth lines on top, especially when David’s voice isn’t really that boss at carrying the “dark vibe” the album tries so hard to create. Yes, folks, this means he’s still warbling.
This album
is better when it doesn’t try so hard, either to be dark (“She Shook Me Cold”)
or “synthy” (“Saviour Machine”). I
suppose “Width of a Circle,” in that it’s eight minutes long, clearly tries very hard to be proggy and complicated
and nevertheless turns out well anyway, is a pretty glaring exception to this
statement, but the other songs I like best are simply catchy boogie-rock or
pop-sock tunes. The simple “Black
Country Rock” rides an agreeable boogie vibe pretty damn far and remains catchy
in spite of lyrical flubs like David’s saying the word “view” twice in about
three seconds and vocal idiocy like how David somehow makes his voice start
vibrating in the most ridiculous manner possible near the end (and he does this
on purpose! He thinks it sounds good! Boo!).
The title track, then, is of course the best song, even though the
version Kurdt and his buddies performed on Unplugged is a little better than
the one here, if only because whoever Bowie’s drummer is throws way too many unnecessary fills in there
and ends up being too busy for the song’s own good. The main riff, though (you know, the one
clearly from an electric guitar on the Nirvana show), is fantastic, catchy, and
simple. No great pretensions with this song, you
know? Just a simple, catchy song.
The rest of
the album is relatively odd. “After All”
is acoustic nothingness punctuated by chants and an occasional rhythm that
sounds like some sort of evil polka (possibly the only time
I feel the same way about the
record as a whole. Like I’ve said, this
is the first album David’s released that I don’t feel the need to make fun of
for the bulk of the review, and it’s the first Bowie album that people with
just a passing knowledge of Bowie would actually believe was written by the man
(assuming you excise the title track from Space
Oddity, of course), but that doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Bowie is actually doing a
(almost shockingly spot-on) imitation of Marc Bolan's voice near the
end of Black Country Rock...so...just thought you might like to know
things like that instead of putting an artist down due to your own ignorance.
...just kidding. Anyway, I pretty much agree with you on the album; the title
track is a major classic (much better than Nirvana's still very good cover,
imo) and Width of a Circle and Black Country Rock are minor ones, the rest
ranges from absolutely awful (particularly She Shook Me Cold...man, those
ultra-sexual lyrics sound infuriating coming from Bowie at this point) to just
plain mediocre to a few okay ones. Still, the majority is still decent enough
that I'd give the album a weak 7/10.
Hunky Dory (1971)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Queen Bitch”
First of all (and I know I’ve made similar comments regarding earlier reviews of mine in several other places on this website), I would like to sincerely apologize for the horrific quality of my original review of Hunky Dory, which I’m pretty sure was written way back in junior year of college during the fledgling months of this website. I just went back and read it a minute ago to see if there were any clever little quips I could re-use for this one and couldn’t even get through one paragraph without cringing. Gawd, that thing’s awful. So, again, sorry. If you see something on this website full of unnecessary capitals and cursing that reads like it was written by an eight-year-old with ADD, that’s gonna be from the first, say, half-year of this site. If it’s on a miscellaneous page, just wait until (if) I do a full page for the band reviewed and I’ll correct the problem. If it’s on like the Radiohead page or something…yeah, those aren’t getting re-written (considering how much I update nowadays, do you really want me to spend my time re-writing old reviews?). Just read the rating and best song (because those are still gonna be the same) and disregard the text underneath. You know, the “review.” Please disregard all such “reviews” from this “record review website.”
Anyway, here’s my theory behind Hunky Dory and its completely out-of-place happy piano pop qualities: perhaps our good friend Mr. Bowie wanted to follow up his dark, muddy glam-rock Man Who Sold the World record with what would seem like a natural progression from it: a classic glam-space-rock “Look! I have an alternate persona! Aren’t I artistic?” masterpiece (like, you know, what Ziggy Stardust sort of is). However, if you remember, The Man Who Sold the World wasn’t all that good. Does it seem natural that someone could go directly from that sloppy, under-written thing to Ziggy Stardust in one step? The fuck it does. He’d got the tone and the occasional “shocking” gay sex lyrics down, but his songwriting still needed work. Therefore, perhaps he decided to take an album to focus just on that (i.e. the songwriting), and if he needed to put away Mick Ronson for an album and return to his trusted acoustic guitar, pianos (which he was somehow able to get Rick “Six Wives of Henry VII” Wakeman to come in and play for him), strings, etc. musical stew (i.e. the stuff he used on Space Oddity) to work on this, then fine. And if a bunch of the songs sound like goofball showtunes, and three right in a row in the second half are all tributes to other people much cooler than David at this point in time, and if the last song on the album is a giant ball of crap that sucks, then fine. If this straightforward happy pop music is what’s necessary for David to make something as bad-ass as Ziggy Stardust, so be it.
Hell, I’m just glad he finally made
an album I can support. Piano pop with
gloppy strings or not, this is the first album where David’s songwriting has
actually reached a level roughly equivalent to his reputation. It actually has some of the best hooks he’s
ever put on record: songs like “Heroes” or “
Of course, not everything is as good as “Changes,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” and “Life on Mars?” Few people could make an album as unfairly melodic as that, and David Bowie circa 1971, fresh off writing exactly zero songs with such qualities, is certainly not gonna be the one to do it. “Eight Line Poem” starts off like the big catchy monsters surrounding it but then goes nowhere and eventually dies quietly in a puddle of non-existence. “Kooks” has so much heft to its bouncy self it makes “Changes” look like “The Gates of Delirium” (like I’m not throwing a Yes reference into a record featuring Rick Wakeman heavily: can I get bonus points for referencing the time where Rick bitched out for an album and was replaced by the crazy Swiss guy?), and “Fill Your Heart” may be even less substantial (though it’s not like either of these songs is bad; they’re just complete throwaways, the aural equivalent of Sweet Tarts or Pixie Stix or something). “Quicksand” is extremely similar to “Life on Mars?” in its overmelodramaticicity and liberal use of strings and other such things, but contains a melody more in the “B+” range than the solid “A” of “Life on Mars?”, and now all we have left to talk about is the “tribute trio” and the closing “The Bewlay Brothers.” “The Bewlay Brothers,” as previously mentioned, is absolutely terrible (I keep reading that it’s a Space Oddity outtake, which would make sense because it sounds like most of that album but much worse and less eventful, but I have a feeling people say that just to make fun of it because, you know, it’s fucking terrible). Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move onto the songs where David references people cooler than he is.
“Andy
Warhol” is the only song here that could possibly be classified as “dark,” with
its not-so-happy (and sorta mildly interesting) acoustic part and David vocals
that may or may not try to be off-key
but end up that way anyway. I’ve never
been a big fan of it. Eh. “Song for Bob Dylan” finds
So, anyway,
at long last we have a good
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
While I don't agree that this
is his first very good album (Space Oddity is great, I swear...maybe it's just
me), Hunky Dory does have some of the most ridiculously catchy songs
However, it is an inconsistent bastard, and while the four songs above, the
hard-rocking Queen Bitch (there's actual words in that chorus, btw), the
insanely cute music hall of Kooks, and the overlooked dark acoustic goodness of
Andy Warhol all melt my face off with poppy goodness, there's still 4 songs
that do just about nothing for me (for a variety of reasons).
Somehow this balances out to about a 9/10 for me.
The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy
Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Suffragette
City
Again: last review sucked; apology; too many capitals and unnecessary unfunny cursing because I used to think that was funny; yadda yadda yadda; moving on.
OK, so Ziggy Stardust, yet another one of those
albums where some people think it’s Bowie’s all-time best album and a
masterpiece and a classic of classics and blah blah blah, and some people don’t
even think it’s very good, and about which I’m gonna go ahead and support
neither camp. It’s certainly
You can
break this album up pretty neatly into three sections: the interesting pop/rock
section (tracks 1-4), the showtuney middle (tracks 5-7), and the kick-ass hot
glam rock final third (tracks 8-11).
There’s also a story about a martian musician named Ziggy Stardust, his
bandmates (known as “the Spiders from Mars”), and his rise and fall as a rock
star. The songs sporadically make
reference to the story (sometimes out of order, or at least out of order if you
think the album is supposed to have a “plot”), but really you can figure out
all you need to know about the story from reading the album title (something
you may have noticed I just did!). In
any case,
So, musically, we’ve more or less got a very good, occasionally great, and on one occasion jawdroppingly classic rock/pop album with hints of glam riffage and a finishing sheen of dark, decadent, space alien weird Bowie rock star egotism sex stuff. Good times. The opening third (i.e. the “interesting pop/sock section”) contains some of Bowie’s best songcraft to date, from the slightly ominous opening buildup number “Five Years,” which manages the neat trick of drawing you into the album brilliantly without really doing anything beyond slowly playing the piano louder throughout the song, to “Starman,” which punctuates rather drab acoustic verses and somewhat gloppy string-heavy choruses with these fantastic “la-la-la-la” guitar breakdowns that probably provide the best moments on the album (something Bowie clearly knows, as he lets the last one drag out for like 2 minutes and punctuates it with strings, vocals, and an extra Ronson guitar solo right on top). “Soul Love” follows the opening-third pattern of stuffing the spicy Ronson action into small, easily definable sections of a song following less exciting verses (though this time the verses are neat and catchy and contain some pretty nice saxophone work). Finally, “Moonage Daydream” stuffs all the ass-fucking euphemisms into a much tighter, more focused, and more interesting package than “Width of a Circle” (though the space metaphors about ray-guns and space-bases are actually slightly less obvious than the lyrics in “Width of a Circle,” if you can believe it). Is this early stuff glam? I’m not sure. It’s seventies and decadent and sexual, so, if that’s your definition, then sure, plus Ronson makes some appreciated appearances…but there are all these strings and whatnot in there, so if you think “glam” is “The Jean Genie” and “Suffragette City” (and I’m not sitting here and making an argument one way or another; I’m not a glam-rock historian or anything), then I suppose it isn’t. It’s pretty good regardless, though.
The showtuney middle is (shockingly!) the least interesting part. “It Ain’t Easy” has a heavy, repetitive chorus and verses that almost don’t exist, “Star” is decent “old-school” piano boogie with Ronson touches about (you’ll never guess this one) being a rock star, and “Lady Stardust” is basically an Elton John ballad (though not a bad one). It’s just the lull, though, before the proto-punk shuffle thing “Hang onto Yourself” welcomes us to the “kick-ass hot glam rock final third.” “Ziggy Stardust” is, as you may have guessed, most of the “story” contained in one track, but an extremely dramatic one at that (“Ziggy plaaayyyyyyyyed guitaaaaaaaarr!”) and the closing “Rock and Roll Suicide” is completely overdone and melodramatic (“OH NO, LOVE! YOU’RE NOT ALONE!!”) but works anyway, partially because the album as a whole calls for something like that to end it, but really because the next-to-last track, “Suffragette City,” is one of the best glam-rock songs ever written and kicks my ass into next week, and to end on anything other than an overdone high note after it would be thoroughly ridiculous. It’s fun to play this thing on Rock Band and make someone awkward who doesn’t know the song too well do the vocals on it. “No, dude, you really have sell the ‘WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU MA’AM!’ thing.” Ha! Perhaps only I think this is funny. In any case, the song is big giant balls of pure rock force, with the banging piano and sax notes only adding to the awesome.
I’m not
sure if this review’s been all that much better than my original one, but this
is probably because I’m still not quite sure how to review this record. The easy way out is to either to go “
heidiot77769@aim.com writes:
This here album is one of
those big acknowledged masterpieces where I agree with said status 100%. It's
the only real 10/10 all-time masterpiece
...and really, it's one where's there's not much to talk about. You have your
dramatic ballads ("Five Years", "Lady Stardust", "Rock
'n' Roll Suicide") and pop-rockers (most of the rest), all which work
excellently. The only non-classics in my opinion are "It Ain't Easy"
which is a little over-the-top and cliched (but it's still good), and
"Star" which is a little too lightweight and doesn't have an A-level
hook (but it's still good).
Everyone loves to fellate "
My personal favorite though is the all-too-frequently-overlooked title track.
It may seem like "nothing" but a compact pop-rocker, but it's so
perfect in every way that it becomes transcendent. One of
So yeah, it's a 10. Not every album, in my opinion, needs to have
earth-shattering resonance or a larger than life "masterpiece" feel
to be truly great, sometimes it can just be so fun
and enjoyable throughout that it reaches that level, and this album
is a perfect example of that.
...I mean, come on, you gave THREE Van Halen albums the highest grade, and this
album can't get any love?
=[
(Brad responds:
See, but I REALLY like Van Halen…)
Aladdin Sane (1973)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Watch
That Man”
Heavier and druggier follow-up to Ziggy Stardust that’s equal parts loud-ass glam metal Ronson showcases and meandering pseudo-artsy jazz and/or doo-wop things. I definitely like the album, probably nearly as much if not as much as Hunky Dory, but it’s got that problem lots of albums released after someone blows up tend to have: they’re just not as fun and feel long, weighty, and overdone. Sure, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust had their overwrought songs both good and bad (“Life on Mars?”, for instance), but those albums were by a guy who hadn’t hit it big yet: light and fun and enthusiastic and stuff. A guy sitting at the top and doing heroin isn’t gonna write “Changes,” you know? Sure, “enthusiastic” doesn’t necessarily mean “good” (I’m sure David was really enthusiastic about that train wreck of a debut album he crapped out in 1967), but it certainly helps.
In short,
this is like
The regular rockers are pretty much aces, though, as far as I’m concerned, and pack more of a punch (at least in terms of sheer volume and crunchiness…not ass-kicking, for which “Suffragette City” has it all and then some) than anything on Ziggy Stardust. The Spiders had been together for a while by this point (really since The Man Who Sold the World, if you believe the first website that came up when I googled “The Spiders from Mars”), and all the playing and touring had made them a pretty fucking good hard rock band. As such, “The Jean Genie” is a super catchy stomper, “Cracked Actor” is a brilliant dark rocker, and “Watch that Man” is a fantastic celebratory glam-pop-rock piece of awesomeness. The latter two in particular are the biggest treats of the album for me. Ronson really turns up the sleaze in “Cracked Actor” and delivers some of his finest solo lines to back the menacing riffage, while David’s vocals (“Crack baby crack, show me you’re real!”) match the tone of the song perfectly. And “Watch that Man” is probably about as good a straight-ahead glam rocker as the band was capable of doing at this point. It’s got all the touches, of course: saxes, piano, backup singers, whatever. So yeah, it’s thick and heavy and kind of cumbersome (like the entire album, really, bar “The Jean Genie” and the doo-wop songs), but the sheer drive and catchiness of the thing makes up for it.
“Panic in
So yeah,
except for the Stones cover (again, horrendous!) and a few of the arty
experiments, another good one for
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Ah, Aladdin Sane. Interesting
album. Lots of people shout that
MOVING ON.
I really like the production on this one. Cold and European, as previously
mentioned, and the guitars have a real proto-metal crunch to them that's
pleasing to these ears.
The rockers are mostly pretty darn good. "The Jean Genie" and
"The Prettiest Star" aren't going to be anyone's favorite
Oh yeah! This album is an inconsistent bastard, and even though nothing even
comes close to bad, some of the songs seem weirdly...unfinished...not in a
"half-assed" sort of way, but like..."Panic in Detroit" -
Cool crunchy riffing and solo's, but why is there no real chorus to speak of? I
mean, there sort of is one, but it's pretty undeniably weak ...and as for
the "Let's Spend the Night Together" cover, I like it...but not
completely. The start is so charming in it's offbeatness and total disregard
for the original melody that it works, but I get a little bored around the
midsong breakdown part and it never really gets back on track.
Also partially falling into the "flawed" category is
"Drive-In Saturday". Most people just take it as a throwaway sci-fi
doo-wop number, but I think it's pretty great, the chorus especially....until
The other three tracks seem to split opinion a bit, but I love them all. The
title track is the best thing here and an absolute classic, and I don't quite
understand why lots of people don't seem to "get" it. Great falsetto
chorus, and the "avant-garde" piano solo is incredibly
entertaining.
"Time" is one weird piece of lounge-jazz doo-wop rock; I
personally find the "la la la la" chorus irresistible.
...and finally, "Lady Grinning Soul" I've always liked a lot.
Kind of surprisingly stark and sort of James Bond-ish at the same time.
But I really like this album as a whole, enough that it gets a weak 9 from me.
Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The
Motion Picture Soundtrack (2003)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Moonage
Daydream”
Soundtrack to the D.A.
Pennebaker documentary of the last show of the Aladdin Sane tour (and
Look, yes,
obviously the genre of music that “Watch That Man” falls into is something I
usually enjoy more than what “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud” falls into, but I
also like to think I can recognize what a band’s good at. This band is amazing at playing fast and
loud, and not so awesome at doing other stuff.
When they dip into Hunky Dory
at the end of disc one for “Oh! You Pretty Things” and “Changes” (both of which
are great songs!), all I can think is “I wanna hear ‘Ziggy Stardust’
again.” They can’t really pull these
songs off the way they’re meant to be.
“Oh! You Pretty Things” Mick Ronson tries to spice up with his licks and
turn into more of a rocker, but, dammit, it’s a bouncy piano pop tune! It’s not like
Of course,
disc one ends with this horrible fucking over-quiet non-melodic mess called “My
Death,” and disc 2 actually contains their cover of “Let’s Spend the Night
Together” on it, which doesn’t get any better when moved to a live setting. Also, outside of some of the more
hair-raising moments during the nearly sixteen-minute solo-heavy rendition of
“Width of a Circle,” the post-“interval” band doesn’t seem to work up as much
of a lather. Maybe the sound quality
dipped between disc 1 and 2? Likely not,
as that makes no goddamn sense at all.
But given how “Moonage Daydream” is the most I’ve had my ass kicked in
months, wouldn’t you think “Cracked Actor” would be just as awesome? Then why isn’t it? And why does “
This is a
really good live album, but the half of it that blows me away makes the rest of
it annoy me. I wish they kicked my ass
the whole 90 minutes instead of fifteen minutes straight at the beginning and
then in fits and starts after that. When
this thing cooks, though, it cooks. If you never thought
Pin Ups (1973)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Sorrow”
The last album recorded with the
Spiders (minus Woody Woodmansey, who has apparently been replaced by someone
named “Aynsley Dunbar.” What is it about
I don’t
know, maybe
The two songs
I enjoy to a degree are the opening speedy skiffley thing “Rosalyn,” which is
too energetic to sound too bad, and “Sorrow,” which is one of the few songs
that Bowie actually tries to sing like a normal human being during (at least
for the first half…) and which has this genuinely very good part before the
strings come in where two saxes duel each other in a surprisingly melodic
manner. That’s pretty much it for
goodness, though. This album defines the
term “throwaway.” It is literally meant
to be purchased, listened to once, elicit a remark along the lines of “oh…yes,
that certainly had some songs on it, I suppose,” and then summarily thrown
away. It’s not like any of these covers
were so good that
Diamond Dogs (1974)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Diamond
Dogs”
Strange, muddy, slow, gloomy, ugly, and altogether unsatisfying science fiction pseudo-glam rock album that most seem to find decent but I don’t really like much at all. The problem here is that David has absolutely no idea what he wants to do. The Ziggy character is still around (and even more androgynous than before, to judge by the cover), but the Spiders are gone, so he can’t pump up the hot glam rock action like he used to. He apparently attempted originally to frame the album conceptually around 1984 by George Orwell (hence song titles like “Big Brother” and, you know, “1984”), but quickly abandoned this when he realized it was kind of a retarded idea and instead decided to make it more “generically sci-fi” (hence the aforementioned album cover and the weird opening narration “Future Legend,” which sounds like a science fiction cliché Mad Libs). Of course, he couldn’t fill up an entire album this way either, so we’ve also got a shitty, incredibly overwrought ballad called “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” and the hit glam single “Rebel Rebel,” both of which fit with the album (both musically and conceptually) about as well as Dick Cheney would fit in a stage production of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Put simply, this album is weird and makes no sense.
As far as I’m concerned, there are really just two songs worth hearing. The title track is the only tune that’s legitimately interesting to me. It’s essentially a generic David glam tune (sometimes it sounds like slowed-down, uglier version of “Watch that Man”), but it at least adds enough neat things to the stew to make it a thoroughly rewarding and worthwhile experience. Like the vocals that sound like the singer’s underwater? I totally dig those things! They’re strange and muddy but they work, you know? This whole song is like that. It’s a regular David glam song (unlike anything else on the album), but it seems to fit the tone of the album nonetheless. It’s spooky and kind of gross and sometimes it sounds like the speakers are vomiting some of the sounds at you, but it’s also catchy as hell, has well-done sax parts, great vocals, and a superior riff (at least at the beginning and end when the guitar is given prominence). It doesn’t even feel like the six minutes is too long, either. Is it as good as David’s best from Hunky Dory, Ziggy, and Aladdin Sane? Fuck no! But it’s very interesting and it’s on an album without much quality, so I feel like I need to spend a paragraph elucidating how neat it is.
Anyway, I did say two songs were worthwhile right? Yeah (good writing there, moron). Anyway, the second is obviously “Rebel Rebel,” which has one of the catchiest and flat-out best glam riffs I’ve heard in my life, and…well…it’s a good song and all, but…see, this is my problem with it: it’s barely even a song! It’s one riff and one melody line repeated for five minutes. In a ten-second clip on a clothing commercial it sounds amazing, but then you listen to the whole song, and…wow, that riff doesn’t change once, does it? There’s no development, like David realized he needed an Aladdin Sane-esque hit single, came up with that riff, and said “alright then, there’s my hit.” Oh well. Good song still, though, if lacking in ideas and development.
That’s a problem with the album as a whole, really. So much of the stuff just kind of mills around without doing anything and then ends. Like the “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” suite. Are these even songs? They just meander around from one sound effect or plodding rhythm to the next with only the persistent feeling of boring ugliness holding them together. This stuff doesn’t sound good! It doesn’t sound cliched or stupid, no. It just doesn’t sound good. And am I crazy or does the second part of “Sweet Thing” start playing something that sounds suspiciously like the piano part from “Changes” for a bit? That end of “Sweet Thing” is really where the song jumps the shark. It had been merely meandering and even occasionally interesting, but then the floating guitar feedback ending (which again just sounds ugly) totally knocks it down into shitsville until it segues into the riff from “Rebel Rebel” (which is such a drastic shift in goodness it’s like you forget the previous eight minutes ever happened).
The best bit out of what’s left (to me) is the opening minute or so of “We are the Dead,” which is relatively nice with the light keyboard and all, but at about the 1:20 mark, this odd echoey guitar comes in and the song just turns into another meandering, ugly thing that talks about “defecating” and “fuck-me pumps” in a (likely) futile attempt to be “shocking.” It just doesn’t do anything. I don’t find it especially offensive…just, you know, unexciting and ugly, and what makes it worse is that the pretty keyboard part actually comes back once more, only to again be enveloped by the ugly. It’s not very strong.
In terms of other songs, I’ve already mentioned “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” (it’s not good), which only leaves the last three. People seem to like “1984,” but to me it just sounds like a proto-disco song (with the string swirls and everything) from 1974 sung by a coked out and self-consciously crooning David Bowie (and no, that’s not a description aiming to make it sound pleasing). “Big Brother” may or may not be an attempt at some kind of big thematic climax (I get the sense it is, if only from the big “Someone to save us! Some brave Apollo!” chorus), but (shockingly!) it doesn’t work. This one’s not especially ugly (Hey! Bonus!), but it’s still unexciting, and the closing “Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family” is pretty much atrocious. Weak ending to a weak album.
In terms of a mathematical breakdown of “songs I like” and “songs I don’t,” perhaps a 5 is actually too generous for this thing, but the album doesn’t feel moronic or stupid or cheesy or anything, so there’s really nothing about it that makes me angry. I just don’t think it’s very good. It’s got one pretty great song and one good (but overrated) song with an amazing riff, and then a bunch of slow, muddy, ugly stuff with scattershot sci-fi themes that generally doesn’t work. It’s not like it’s fucking Tonight, though. Just not very good. Moving on…
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
I hate to criticize you or
the site, I truly do, but this is one of several times where you've criticized
an album's production due to what seems to me to just be bad mp3's. I'm
listening to the 30th Anniversary sexed-up remastered edition right now, and while
it's possible that the album did sound shitty and muddy before said
remastering, it sounds great now! Not at all muddy, actually quite a sharp
little bastard.
Anyway, I have to take the big thumbs-up position on this album, not because
the half-assed concept or anything like that (
(In my opinion)
Diamond Dogs is just a great extended mid-70's Stones sounding rocker, and
Rebel Rebel may be repetitive, but that never bothered me too much. Have you
ever listened to a lot of glam-rock? True glam-rock like 70's T. Rex or Slade
or The Sweet? FAIRLY repetitive genre, that's just how it goes. I guess it all
comes down to whether you dig the riff or groove enough to take as much of it
as you get, and with Rebel Rebel I certainly do love that riff, the chorus, and
Bowie's charming vocals enough that I could probably stand 10 minutes of it.
Maybe not, but you get the point anyway.
I think the biggest "get it or not" aspect of this album is that some
songs just don't hit you at first and may take a while to get under your skin,
which is rare for the usually pop-hooks upfront
Then there's "We Are the Dead", another "where's the hook?"
song. But hey, what do you know, it may take a while to find, but this song
does actually have both a structure and a fairly strong hook.
Rounding things off, "Big Brother" has more good singing from Bowie
and a chorus that starts off cool but just kind of fizzles out into an
anti-climax (still a very good song though), "Rock 'n' Roll With Me"
is cheesy and lightweight, but catchy (I like when Bowie's singing gets
operatic, what can I say), and 1984 is a weirdly awesome proto-disco number.
I'm a bit surprised that you don't care for this one, it's pretty damn catchy.
So, what the heck, it's worth a 9/10.
David Live (1974)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Watch
That Man”
It’s late right now and I’m tired and rather cranky from reading about obscure Roman authors for the last three hours (like…Nigidius Figulus! Who? Exactly!) for an exam I won’t actually be taking for over two months, which means I’m in a perfect state of mind to review this universally-panned pile of pig excrement. To be quite honest, I shouldn’t even have to type a review here. I should just able to direct you to the album cover I’ve so nicely pasted above and leave it to you to deduce the quality of said live album from the fact that David actually looked just like that when he got up on stage and gave the concert this record documents. And he looked just like that for every show on the tour. If you need another example of how abso-fucking-lutely horrendous David looked at this time, click on the first link I posted at the end of the intro, which is an interview taken from roughly the same time as this concert. For fuck’s sake, the man weighs 50 pounds! He actually looks miles better in the interview despite the constant sniffing for lack of cocaine, principally because he’s not wearing the ridiculous white leisure suit he’s sporting in the album cover above I’ve already referred but must make reference to again. Look at that man! You think a guy who looks like that is gonna give a good live show?
A bit of background: the Diamond Dogs tour (which is nominally what this concert is taken from) wasn’t supposed to be this fucking bad. It was supposed to be, you know, a rock tour, the final sendoff for the Ziggy character and all that jazz (David still looks like Ziggy on the Diamond Dogs cover, after all), but alas no! The concept and sets and whatnot were changed at the last minute after the Spiders broke up, David hired a giant, lumbering soul band as its replacement because of his new fascination with such music, and then of course hilarity ensued. See, David’s digging soul all of a sudden is all well and good, but the problem was that his setlist contained exactly zero soul songs in it, so you end up having a soul band (with horns and backup singers and no musical member at all used to playing loud glam rock) trying to play all of Bowie’s glam rock classics even though they have no idea how to play them, so they play them like soul songs, giving the loud, annoying horns preeminence over everything else and losing all semblance of four on the floor rock rhythms the songs may have originally had…except they’re not soul songs, so instead of sounding like soul music they sound like rock music played by people who don’t know what rock music sounds like so they try to make it soul music but can’t because it’s rock music. So no, this was not gonna turn out well.
In spite of
all this, a lot of the songs on display are so good (in their original contexts
at least…this would be a pretty rippin’ setlist were the Spiders involved in
any way whatsoever) that upon first listen I didn’t even think it was that
bad. I mean, sure, I thought it was bad, but I didn’t see the kind of
historical ineptitude traditionally attributed to this thing. It was around listen #5, though, that
something snapped in my head and I realized that damn near three quarters of
this album is just about unlistenable due to David’s horrible and nearly
offensive vocals (It’s like he doesn’t even like these songs! And they’re his fucking songs!) and the band’s absolutely butchering everything
set before it. You ever wanted to know
what “Cracked Actor” might sound like with no guitar crunch but a huge horn
section playing all off the riffs? How
about what “
You know they play “The Jean Genie” here too? And “All the Young Dudes?” And “Width of a Circle?” Seriously! “Width of a Fucking Circle!” Take a guess how that sounds. It’s a joke. This album is a goddamn joke. Why David thought it might be a good idea to have a huge, unwieldy soul band play execrable, pseudo-soul versions of all his best glam-rock classics while he stood onstage in a white leisure suit and looked like he was about to die, I will never know. But, apparently, he did. Do not buy this album.
Young Americans (1975)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Young
Americans”
David’s oft-shat upon (sensing a theme here? The man hit a bit of a losing streak in the 70’s) attempt at so-called “plastic soul” that’s really not all that bad because two of the songs totally kick. I should also let you know right now that this review will not be long, so if you only have time for one more amazingly clever bit of music criticism before you go to bed, you’ll be getting plenty of sleep tonight. This is because only three songs are worthy of comment at all: the title track and the closing classic “Fame” (i.e. the two that kick) and the cover of “Across the Universe” (because…well…David Bowie is covering “Across the Universe” as an intentionally throwaway plastic soul piece of ass background music and John Lennon is giving clearly audible background vocals! Doesn’t that seem like it should be commented on?). The rest are so unmemorable and yet strangely non-maddening that I can recall not a thing about any of them. They even have such nondescript titles as “Win,” “Fascination,” and “Can You Hear Me?” There is nothing about them that’s interesting, but I’m sure they sounded just fine as background music at whatever cokehead parties David was going to in the seventies when he looked like a ghost with neon orange hair. And that’s all I will say about the songs that aren’t the three that warrant comment.
The title track is actually one of Bowie’s best-ever songs (to my likely completely wrong ears) despite not having any more artistic merit than the toss-off mediocrity you’ll find on every track that doesn’t open or close the album. It’s just such a wonderfully infectious song, and David shows off so much charisma throughout, that I don’t see how it’s possible to dislike it. I don’t even mind the constant David Sanborn wankery and the omnipresent background vocals! They’re just as bouncy and nice as everything else. I dare you to dislike it. I dare you! You can’t do it. I don’t think you could dislike the outrageously funky and endlessly interesting “Fame” at the end, either. The song probably contains more or less the entire artistic worth of the album itself. The whole thing is odd, weird, dark, paranoid, in your face…i.e. exactly what every second of this album that’s not “Fame” is not, and it even manages to have by far the funkiest beat on the album…hell, probably of David’s career (although what am I saying…of course it’s the funkiest of David’s career, given that he’s not even trying to be a funk or soul artist on every album he’s ever put out that’s not called Young Americans). Dig the “Fame fame fame fame fame fame…” thing where the voice keeps moving to lower and lower and looowwwwer pitch, too. What a fucking song. It’s probably better than “Young Americans” because it’s more interesting and worthwhile and unique, but I like “Young Americans” better because (unlike “Fame”) it so perfectly captured the vibe of what the rest of this album was trying to be. That and I tend to like stupid happy catchy songs.
Finally, “Across the Universe” is just odd. David murders it in one sense, but since sometimes it feels like this whole album is murdering something to a degree (don’t ask me why), oddly it seems to fit. Plus you can totally hear John in the background yelping out the background vocals. At least David doesn’t involve Sanborn or the backup singers, but the total soul seventies guitars are pretty blatant. It’s probably better if you don’t know it’s on here (which means…sorry!), because here you are listening to this oddly non-angering background ass soul music and all of a sudden here’s Dave belting out “Across the Universe” like his life depended on it (but doing it badly…but strangely I don’t seem to mind), and you’re completely flummoxed by this, and then you keep listening and…holy crap, John Lennon’s giving background vocals in there! And he’s butchering it too! And it’s his fucking song! Ha! So funny. You know who else does background vocals on this album? Luther Vandross! No shit! Ha ha! So much comedy…
Obviously
there’s no need to buy this or even download it in its entirely. Just download the title track and “Fame”
because they’re awesome (and both of which you’ve probably already heard ad
nauseam anyway) and “Across the Universe” because it’s hilarious and be done
with it. If you haven’t heard the rest of
it, that’s really not all that different from having heard it, so no big loss
there. A bunch of tolerably mediocre
throwaway fake soul in between two of
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Yeah, my opinion on this is
pretty much the same as everyone else's. It's pretty average, but really not
that bad. But I'm such a nice guy I'd actually give it a point higher than you.
I actually like most of the songs here. The album has a nice sound to it
(listen to the cute little riffs in "Win"), it's just that most
(including the cover of "Across the Universe" which probably should
be a butchery but just sounds decent to my ears like most of the rest) of it
never rises above "decent".
I do like "Somebody Up There Likes Me" a bit more than the rest; it's
kind of the third song that rises above decent here for a while (has quite a
nice hook), atleast until it ends in like 3 solid minutes of shitty sax
soloing.
...and yeah, the opener and closer are awesome and both career highlights which
alone would justify the "it's really fairly decent" opinions this
album seems to attract nowadays.
You kind of missed the boat on the title track unfortunately; once you get past
the cheesiness (like Tom Waits growly voice, it's something you can't help but
notice at first and then hardly notice at all once you get used to it) it
reveals itself to be a really wonderful song, and not just in a "dumb
cheesy way" either.
...and Fame is Fame, no need to say anything about it.
7/10 for the album.
Station To Station (1976)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Station
To Station”
And thankfully, this is now the best David has done since Aladdin Sane, and for my money the best of the man’s career. It’s also a testament to the occasional benefits that go along with being absolutely fucked up out of one’s mind (case in point: Metallica, whom an acquaintance of mine once remarked needed to report to a “re-tox” center after listening to Load), as I once read somewhere (from such a reputable source that I can’t actually recall where I read it) that David was so out-there on cocaine when recording it that this is the only album he doesn’t remember recording. Whether this is true or not (and I kind of hope it is, since wouldn’t that be awesome?), and whether or not the cocaine actually had anything to do with the fact I’m about to talk about, this record marks the beginning of definitely the most rewarding period of David’s career, that wonderful time during the second half of the seventies when he (gasp!) didn’t seem to care one bit about commercial success. This, of course, means that David’s best, coolest, hippest, and most influential music came during the one period where he didn’t especially give a crap about selling records. Let this be a lesson to all the aspiring young musicians who read my website with an eye toward shaping their rock. If you are doing this, please stop, because you will fail.
Anyway, the
music here is a super-cool mixture of ultra-modern, extremely hip-sounding and
slightly detached rock music, the soul and/or disco stylings David dove
headfirst into on the last album, and some dashes of that special semi-avant-garde
European “flavor” he’d be diving headfirst into on the next couple of albums
after this. In other words, it’s not
easily definable as his “plastic soul” album or one of his “Berlin trilogy”
records or whatnot, and as there are dashes of both here (though the influence
of what he just did is much larger
than the influence of what he was about to do), and as it falls right between
the two easily definable things I just mentioned, some like to term this
David’s “transitional” album between the two because some of it has a disco
beat and it kind of sounds like maybe it’s sorta European. I counter that David was so beyond-fucked-up
at the time that I doubt he was consciously trying to do much of anything at
this point beyond grooving real good and writing some pretty fucking
interesting rock music, so I don’t really buy the “transitional” tag all that
much. Plus there are absolutely no
electronics on this, which is kind of the whole point of the
Giving this
album a genre besides “really modern, hip-sounding, interesting rock music” is
impossible. It is what it is, and it’s
pretty damn great. The title track, all
three-songs-in-one ten mother-loving minutes of it, is my pick for best song
Anyway, “Golden Years” is something you may have heard if your
knowledge of
The other half of the album is unfortunately not as white-hot awesome, but mostly it’s still pretty good. “Stay” is the other “rock” song on the album, and it’s the one that most sounds like it could have been written by the guy that just released Young Americans a year ago. The guitar riff is pretty tasty, and the verses (“this week dragged past me so slowly…”) certainly go along with the theme of the record as so far laid out, but the heavy bongo usage (you know, the kind of bongos that laaaiiiiid back seventies soul music for swinger parties used to have) is a bad omen that comes to full fruition on the semi-cheesy chorus that sounds just like something from the amorphous mass in the middle of Young Americans (although with good vocals and sweet guitars in the background, so don’t worry, it’s not like we’re totally lost here). There are also two ballads here, one of which (“Word on a Wing”) still manages to be nicely interesting and stay within the vibe of the record as a whole, and the other of which (the random cover “Wild is the Wind”) closes the album on an unfortunately mellow, unexciting and (the worst offense on a record such as this) uninteresting note. I’d honestly consider (and probably give out) a 10 for this thing if it ended on a high note, so interesting and cool is the rock contained herein, but “Wild is the Wind” cancels any chance of that. Throw it on Pin Ups and it probably gets “best track” award because it’s actually tasteful. Stick it on the end of Station to Station, just one track removed from the wonderfully weird “TVC15,” and we’ve got problems.
Despite the
hiccup at the end, this is still my favorite
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Besides Ziggy, this is my
favorite
Maybe not.
Anyway, I don't feel like commenting too much on the title track,
TVC-15, or Golden Years, all of which have awesome grooves, are catchy as hell,
and have some of
I'd like to offer a defense for the sadly neglected other side of the album.
See, people have a weird reaction to ballads in general, and this album is a
great example. I really really really do not at all get the "oh yeah, the
ballads...they're decent I guess" reaction that "Wild is the Wind"
and "Word on a Wing" draw from people. Why is it that
critics/listeners/whatever can go over rock songs with a fine-toothed comb and
pick out all the details, but when it comes to ballads their brains seem to go
on auto-pilot. Seriously, listen to "Word On a Wing" and tell me
what's wrong with it. Great singing and a fantastic build-up to an excellent
chorus. There's hardly a flaw to be voiced besides "it's all slow and soft
and stuff" and that's not really fair.
I don't know, maybe I'm the only man left alive that likes a good ballad. Oh
yeah, "Wild is the Wind" kicks ass too. Maybe a little over-the-top,
and I can see how one skeptical of
...and "Stay", well, no actual need to defend this one BRUTHA,
awesome riff, cool crooning verses, and a monster catchy chorus that is not
cheesy in the slightest.
I GIVE IT A TEN!
Low (1977)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Sound And
Vision”
I’m not ashamed to admit I
really didn’t like this album, the first of Bowie’s famed “Berlin trilogy” in
which our hero moves to West Berlin to get generally freaky in a cutting-edge
electronic textures way with his porn-loving friend Brian Eno, at all the first
time I heard it. The reason is that it’s
really two completely different half-albums, neither of which is very
immediately welcoming, smooshed together with little connection to each other
beyond the semi-ambient sounds in “A New Career in a New Town” which I suppose
are intended to “transition” the listener to the start-stop, two-minute quickie
song oddball pop-rock on the first side to the ambient soundscape skullduggery
on the second. In any case, as you can tell
from the rating pasted above, I’ve certainly softened a bit in my general
opinion of it, but I still can’t help but think it’s a little overrated
musically. And sure, maybe that’s often
the case with albums that are revered for their “art” and their “influence”
(and I’ll grant that this is probably Bowie’s most obviously influential
album…not that it has tons of competition beyond the few albums immediately
surrounding it, given Bowie’s propensity to usurp others’ ideas and popularize
them instead of coming up with stuff by himself), but the fact remains that
half of this album consists of undeveloped, hit-or-miss half-songs and the
other half consists of Grade A Brian Eno Special Ambient Music (which is nice
and all, but is prevented from being any better than “nice” due to an
unfortunate lack of anything happening), so yeah…it is what it is, you know?
As mentioned several times
already in this review, side 1 is the side that has songs on it, and thus will
be where most people go to find enjoyment from this record. The main thing that’s gonna hit you here is
that, despite this record’s artistic reputation and all the words like
“oddball” and whatnot that I’ve been throwing out, really, these are completely
regular pop-rock songs at their basic level.
They’re certainly more “normal” from a songwriting perspective than the
three killer-amazing-orgazmo songs on Station
to Station (the title track, “Golden Years,” “TVC15”), due mainly to their
not being vamps and to their lasting considerably less than 6-10 minutes. What’s different and odd and new and
“artistic” is the fact that Eno’s gotten his grubby little hands on them,
chopped them up, flayed them, and spit them back up full of all sorts of
interesting and often downright strange
“sounds” from the bank of synths that was probably attached to him and feeding
off his body in a generally symbiotic relationship by this point. See, this album is not about songs (which is a good thing, because
half of it has half-assed songs and half of it has no songs), but about textures, and that’s what I didn’t realize when I first listened to it and kept
looking for the mind-blowingly amazing artistic collaboration I’d been hearing
about so much. The songs are all
infested (usually in a good way) with these strange sounds (like the bubbling
thing on “What in the World,” or the super-loud “WHEEEEE-OOOOO-OOOOOOO” thing
in “Breaking Glass,” or the sound of your brain on drugs in “Sound and Vision”)
that, oddly, are sort of the whole point of the material. In the songs that have lyrics (two of them
don’t, and these are actually two of the best on the first side), the lyrics
almost seem immaterial; at the very least they don’t seem like they were
thought of as the focal point of the song.
Catchy vocal melodies aren’t found around that often; in fact, the
“catchiest” and most well-constructed traditional song for my money is the
opening instrumental “Speed of Life,” which is certainly more carefully
thought-out and less willingly weird in its textures than the following
two-minute half-songs “Breaking Glass” and “What in the World,” both of which
have thus far been mentioned only in conjunction with a cool synth effect they
have. “Breaking Glass” has a neat bass
line and lead guitar lick in there as well, but for “What in the World,” the
bubbly synth is probably the most important thing it has going for it.
The odd thing about all this (i.e. that the songs are only half-songs, the melodies and lyrics are purely secondary, the most interesting thing is the odd synth textures) is that the first side of this album is oddly, well, fun (by the way, you like how many times I used the word “odd” in that sentence?). The synth effects are not heavily layered moody textures of depression or anything…no, see, they’re an egg being splattered or a weird whooshing noise moving from one headphone to the other. They’re fun and interesting textures that embellish the half-songs in just the right ways and make them interesting and (again), well, fun. The best example of this is “Sound and Vision,” which is the only time where what Bowie and Eno were going for on the first side (I can only imagine) reaches prefect fruition. The catchy little guitar riff, repetitive bass line, and (unique for this album) utterly silly and fun background vocals are combined with the chopped-up drums and synth effects to form this perfectly awesome little masterpiece with about one-tenth the dramatic heft of either “Station to Station” or “Heroes” but nevertheless just about as much quality. Kudos also to “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” the only one of the “songs” with “lyrics” that seems like more than a mishmash of ideas (and yes, “Sound and Vision” is a total mishmash of ideas; they just happen to mash together perfectly) and has some real development and tense drama in it. To be honest, outside of these two, the “songs” with “lyrics” still don’t do a lot for me (I’ve already touched on two of these; “Be My Wife” is only slightly less annoying than “What in the World,” and despite the bass line, lead guitar, and synth whoosh thing, “Breaking Glass” is like 100 seconds long and feels like it’s shorter than that), which I guess shouldn’t come as a surprise given the obvious preference given to instrumentals in the album’s construction (two top-notch ones start and finish the first side, and the second side is a bunch of ambient synth sounds), but oh well. This album isn’t about the songs, remember? It’s about the textures.
And that, of course, leads me into a discussion of side 2 that will be as short and summary in character as my knowledge of ambient music prior to listening to this album. I dunno…it’s impossible to say anything here without sounding like an ignoramus. I’ve heard exactly zero Eno ambient albums, of course, not to mention stuff from people like Vangelis or Tangerine Dream or whomever (shockingly, not in my current collection), so hell. I can tell you I like “Warszawa” a bit and enjoy the shifting tones and chords in there, and that the plinky top and supporting synth pads of “Weeping Wall” are pretty suspenseful. “Art Decade” doesn’t really seem to be doing anything (which it may be, but maybe I just don’t know it is because I don’t “get” ambient music), and David’s chanting in “Subterraneans” is creepy, but I don’t know if I like it or not because after 15-20 minutes of ambient I’m not really sure if any of this stuff is good or not because it all starts to sound the same. I dunno, I think I like how “Heroes” does the “ambient side” thing better, in that the ambient tracks segue into each other to form kind of a cohesive whole, plus the “ambient side” is sandwiched by two tracks that aren’t ambient in the least, thus making it not an “ambient side” at all. It’s nice, though.
And that’s it. A side of thrown-together half-songs with odd yet fun synth textures and add-ons that’s consistently good when it doesn’t have lyrics and sporadically awesome when it does, then 20 minutes of soothing synth drones. I’m sure it was a shock that David “Ziggy Stardust” Bowie was putting out an entire side of this ambient stuff in 1977, not to mention the totally non-traditionally commercial nature of the first side, and I can totally see the influence of side 1 on new wave and all that hibbity jibbity, but I just find less to grab onto here than on the albums preceding and following it, and as such am relegating it to tier two of my personal Bowie ranking system along with Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane and a clear step below Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station and Heroes. Lots of people swear by this one, but eh. You can argue if you want. It’s a free country.
Heroes (1978)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Heroes”
My personal favorite of the
“Berlin trilogy” because it actually integrates everything Low was trying to do into a cohesive whole instead of giving us a side
of wacky texture-filled half-songs and a side of ambient nothing. It’s not quite as fun as Low…but it has
Robert Fripp on it, and it’s not like we should expect anything fun from an
album in which Fripperlipps is prominently involved, right? Fun aside, though, what’s great about this
album is that, while the textures are still just as interesting and detailed
(actually probably more detailed, if not as obviously tacked-on and odd), it
actually has songs on it, and it
seems to be based around the novel idea of writing well-thought out,
interesting, fully-developed and unique ones.
Low did not do this. Sure, “Sound and Vision” is fantastic, but
it’s still a half-song like everything else on the first side. It’s just a really good half-song. Some
of this stuff sounds like maybe, in some alternate universe in which
Except for
“Blackout” (which I don’t like all that much and is kind of ugly, especially
those squeaky backup vocal things), side 1 of this baby is pretty much aces. The production is just fuller and thicker
than before (in a good way), and the songs do a good job of matching. Have you heard the title track? It’s pretty good, isn’t it? My favorite part (besides the best
So side 1
is better than Low because it
actually has songs on it (and as a bonus, most of them are really good). Side 2 is also better than Low, principally because instead of
giving you four unconnected ambient tracks and simply asking you to “deal with
it,” the ambient material neither starts nor ends the side, and when it does
come up it’s nicely tied and linked together.
This is good. What’s also good is
“V-2 Schneider,” which does more than I could ever ask with a robotic, lockstep
rhythm line, some honking saxophones, and some synths that sound like they’re
saying “V-2 Schneider!” over and over again (of course the one that sounds like
David Bowie saying “V-2 Schneider” actually is David Bowie). It’s like Low
in that it’s an instrumental that’s as well-crafted and put-together as most
“songs” with “lyrics” I’ve heard, plus it’s also actually goofy as all get-out
(which means Fripp probably wasn’t involved in it, and if he was he didn’t
realize how goofy it was, and either way you can disregard whatever I say at
the start of the review about this album not having any “fun”). The ambient stuff follows after, and this
time I’m happy to say I actually have some opinions on it. “Sense of Doubt” has these descending synth
lines that actually give it some semi-evil sounding drama, which is nice. The plinky Japanese instrument in “
So one kind
of ugly song and one kind of ugly piece of ambient music mar this one, but
otherwise it’s my bet for the last “great” album
Stage (1978)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Station
To Station”
Live album from smack in the
middle of Dave’s
The only relatively interesting fact I can give you about it is that Adrian Belew is prominently involved on guitar, so if Adrian Belew is not an inherently interesting subject to you, this album will lack anything of interest for you. And it’s not like he’s giving his King Crimson/Talking Heads unique crazy goodness here: nope, I honestly didn’t even know he was involved until I read it in the All Music Guide review (which I briefly perused for the possibility of finding useful tidbits just like that one!) for this like half an hour ago. Song selection-wise, it’s very heavily weighted towards the last three albums (shocking, I know), but David does start it with five songs from Ziggy Stardust before getting into the “mature, artistic” material with “Station to Station.” I suppose it could be considered interesting that the Ziggy Stardust songs are played arty Berlin style, but the fact that this makes them not as good sort of kills that possibility for me (robotic and synthy is not how I think of “Hang Onto Yourself”). From this point on, the only songs not from the last three are “Fame” (which is so odd it might as well be) and a totally random cover of the Doors’ “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)” that actually sounds like total crap. One thing that kind of annoys me about the album in general is the synthiness, which is not done in a random, haphazard, fun way like on Low or a dense, dark, interesting way like on Heroes, but in a perfunctory, tacked-on, occasionally overloud way like on a lot of seventies live albums you may hear. It’s not like we have random ELP-synths like that Bob Dylan live album with the Band, but the “electronics” from Low and Heroes seem to have been reduced to a guy or two playing some keyboards, and while this is probably what I should expect considering, you know, they’re playing live, it still hurts the proceedings a bit. I shouldn’t have to tell you that “Heroes” loses a lot in its transition to a live setting, or that the ambient tracks they pick out (“Warszawa,” “Art Decade,” “Sense of Doubt”) sound like someone basically played the studio recording while everyone went offstage to take a piss.
But I did give this a 7, didn’t I? I suppose I did. Like I said, the song selection is pretty choice outside of “Sound and Vision” not being here, and the quasi-perfunctory nature of the proceedings sort of fits the cold, robotic music. “Station to Station” is actually played at like double-speed and kicks some rather serious ass, so that’s a good point right there. “TVC15” and “Speed of Life” sounds pretty good, too. I dunno, maybe after David Live I’m just happy at the overwhelming professionalism of the ensemble gathered together here for your listening pleasure. I’m sure it would’ve been a pretty decent concert to have been at. It wouldn’t have torn me a new asshole or anything, but it would’ve been pretty good. And David wouldn’t have looked like such a cokehead.
Lodger (1979)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “D.J.”
Unsatisfying and anticlimactic
third member of the “
Despite being quite uninteresting, Lodger is actually, like I said, a pretty well-constructed album of quirky pop songs, so I’ll give Mr. Bowie credit for that. It also makes clear the fact that, when Eno got into some type of music or another, he tried to shoehorn it into whatever he was working on at the time. You know those late-seventies Talking Heads albums with all the world-beat influences in them? Yeah. It’d be nice if the material here was as good as Remain in Light or More Songs About Buildings and Food, but alas no. “African Night Flight” seems to exist only for the purpose of its jarring and not-as-rhythmic-as-you-probably-think-world-beat-should-be percussion parts and decidedly non-English backing vocals, and David stays out of the way nicely by chanting something with no melody whatsoever at a relatively low volume. The song seems to want to be odd just for the sake of being odd. I see no other point in it. Elsewhere, “Move On” does the thumping percussion “sing about foreign countries” thing in an altogether better fashion, principally by having a melody and vocals that hit notes I’ve heard before. It’s not the most eventful song in the world, but it’s not like much here is what I’d describe as “eventful.” “Yassassin” stands out because of the tricky guitar part, “ethnic” violins, and David’s trying to pretend that he knows how to sing “middle-eastern style” by singing off-key, but for some reason I find the drum track pretty boss and don’t mind the song in general. At least it’s sort of eventful, right?
This is one
of those albums where you could listen to it like 100 times and not necessarily
get tired of it, but never once have the urge to actually put it on. The “classic” is supposedly “Look Back in
Anger,” and yes, it’s one of the better songs here, but is there all that much
there beyond the hyper-speed drum part and the overdramatic vocals? Not really.
I like the strangely paranoid “D.J.,” in which
Anyway, you know I’m not gonna tell you to go buy this thing, and obviously my review of it is probably not gonna inspire you to go and do so, but in all honesty it is pretty good, and certainly much less flawed than some of David’s other seventies albums that I find overrated (*cough* Diamond Dogs *cough*). I suppose it is interesting for the reason that it doesn’t try to do a lot and succeeds at its modest goals instead of the usual David m.o. of shooting for the stars and coming up either just short (his best) or being way the fuck off (the rest). It’s a nice little odd pop album that you’ll probably like but never have the urge to listen to a second time due to its glaring lack of stuff that’s very interesting. Is that a recommendation or a pan, you ask? Honestly, I’m not even sure.
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Ashes To
Ashes”
The last album released under
the name “David Bowie” I can respect from an artistic point of view for a loooong time, Scary Monsters is certainly more interesting than the last installment of the “Berlin trilogy,” and
I get the urge to listen to it a lot
more than I feel the need to listen to Lodger,
but an unfortunate lack of material that’s any good on the second side leads to
a rating equal with its relatively mundane predecessor. What we have here is a fairly diverse batch
of self-consciously “artsy” rock music that finds David shooting off into a
number of different directions at the same time because he’s not quite sure
what artsy direction he wants to go in next…he just knows he still wants to be
“artsy.” As such, sometimes I think this
may the “weirdest” album
See, I like
this album most when it gives up all pretention to being halfway normal and
just revels in its weirdness. As previously
alluded to, nearly all of this reveling occurs on side 1. The only halfway normal song there is “Up the
Hill Backwards,” but even that presents us with a jarring (there’s that word
again!) juxtaposition of nicely melodic vocal parts with fast, shuffly,
drum-heavy parts punctuated by more
guitars that sound like large drills that are pissed off at something. The title track’s chorus consists of David’s
processed, robotic, sybilline-“s”-producing voice chanting out the words “SCARY
MONSTERS! SUPER CREEPS!” in a way that
was clearly intended to frighten a young child (hell, it frightens me).
And then there are undoubtedly the two most frigged-out singles of
David’s career. I distinctly remember
being out drinking with the fellow classicists a few months ago and trying to
pick out the weirdest song I could find on the Bowie Greatest Hits collection
in the jukebox, an endeavor which brought me to “Fashion” in about three
seconds. In tone and style it’s similar
to “Fame” in that it’s basically a dark, sinister funk song, but the incredibly
detached and robotic tone of the vocals, as well as that loud, ultra-low
farting synth tone and the same scratchy drill funk guitars that we see all
over this record make it a song so truly strange that the one girl in the
department I have absolutely no respect for clenched up her nose like someone
had just left a dead rodent in her purse.
As you can probably guess, this pleased me greatly, almost as much as
the puzzling, maybe-ironic (are they? I
don’t know!) “Fashion! Turn to the
left…” and “We are the good squad and we’re coming to town!” lyrical
selections. I don’t know what this song
is supposed to do for me at all. It just
makes me feel confused and kinda dirty, but this ambiguity is why I like it so
much, you know? The real winner, though,
is the brilliant “Ashes to Ashes,” which disguises one of the best melodies
Dave ever composed with vocals so detached and depressed-sounding that they may
scream “LOOK AT ME! I’M ON COCAINE!”
more than any song I’ve ever heard. The
music, while certainly not “radio-friendly,” is certainly less willfully odd
than, say, “It’s No Game (Part 1)” or “Fashion,” as an echoey, plinky synth and
popping bass lead into some surprisingly jumpy (well…for this album) keyboards
that accompany a falsetto Dave singing one of those melodies that feels warm
and familiar the moment you hear it (“Do you remember a guy that’s
been…”). It’s Dave’s vocal delivery that
gives the song its edge. The
self-referential qualities of the lyrics are something I fully support, and the
moment in the chorus when Dave disinterestedly mumbles “We know Major Tom’s a
junkie…” is borderline chilling, as is the “IIIIIII’m happy…hope you’re happy
tooooo….” bit in the bridge. Call me
crazy, but I actually think this is one of
And then there’s side 2. The one track found here that’s at all memorable is “Teenage Wildlife,” which probably sounds like an amazing song if you’ve never heard “Heroes” and thus don’t realize “Teenage Wildlife” is the same song, only one tenth as interesting. Now, lyrically, I do enjoy the whole “looking back on being a teen idol” thing, and the part where he simulates a conversation between a new, young star, and an old, wise David who unfortunately can’t offer much help (“Don’t ask me, I don’t know any hallways”) is pretty cool. The problem I have is that the song tries to mimic the “Heroes” vibe so shamelessly (and, I might add, so poorly) that whatever genuine sentiments the lyrics may have end up sounding fake by association. It even uses the same trick of having the sustained guitar note at the beginning that lasts through most of the song! And while David in “Heroes” delivered his best vocal performance ever (and didn’t need any help in doing it), David in “Teenage Wildlife” apparently feels that it’s necessary to cart in hordes of backup singers and over-emote like a jackass to create the kind of drama and pathos that came naturally to “Heroes” because it was possibly the most sincere moment of the man’s largely insincere career (and on a side note, the sincerity I detect in “Ashes to Ashes” probably contributes to the high marks I give that one). You can only make “Heroes” once, Dave.
The rest of the second side is extremely mediocre in extremely uninteresting ways. “Scream Like a Baby” contrasts “menacing” loud, marching parts with dark, bubbly synths with chorus parts that may or may not attempt to sound happier with some high-pitched keyboards that sound like crap. Unfortunately, ambiguity only works when the song is good. “Kingdom Come” almost sounds like a regular pop song to me (or at least a slightly normalized version of some of the material from Lodger), and unfortunately contains little to no melody worth mentioning. The only mildly interesting thing about “Because You’re Young” is the keyboard that sounds kind of like an organ trilling in the background, but unfortunately this mildly interesting keyboard fits the rest of this incredibly average pop-rock song about as well as I fit Nebraska, and thus the song is no more memorable than “Kingdom Come.” Finally, “It’s No Game (Part 2)” is the same as “It’s No Game (Part 1),” except David sings normally instead of screeching, there are no skull-drilling guitars, the drums aren’t especially loud, and the crazy Japanese woman (?) is absent. Without any of the four elements that made the first version interesting, the second version sounds shockingly perfunctory. It’s not fucking weird enough! Remember when I said this album was best when it was weird? I wasn’t kidding! The only song on side 2 that is remotely strange is “Scream Like a Baby,” and that’s so poorly written it could make “Fashion” look like something by Maroon 5 and it would still probably suck. “Teenage Wildlife” is an overdramatic wannabe-“Heroes” ballad, and tracks 8-10 may as well not exist. Poo.
Side 1 of
this thing is so nicely strange, interesting, diverse, and well-constructed
that the weirdest thing about this album is how boring side 2 is. Half great, artsy rock music by a guy
flailing around stylistically and succeeding at a remarkable rate, half
thoroughly mediocre wannabe-artsy rock music by a guy flailing around
stylistically and failing every time.
Still, side 1 kicks pretty hard, and “Ashes to Ashes” is a total
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Dammit, Brad, you know I love
you and would willingly bare your children at a moment's notice despite my lack
of ability to do so due to primarily having male genitalia, but this
Bowie-hatred has gone far enough. I won't stand for it. Dammit. You can bash
the rest, I can put up with 7's for Lodger and whatnot, but NOT! SCARY!
MONSTERS!
Okay, okay, I admit, Kingdom Come is not even a conceivably likeable song (it's
a Tom Verlaine cover, btw, as you neglected to mention. Faaaannnboy), and
Screaming Like a Baby pretty much sucks, but I will defend every other song
here until the day I die.
I do like that you recognized the weirdness of this album, lots of people talk
about how "commercial" this album is compared to the Berlin trilogy
as if an album's commercial viability is based solely on dumb critical
stereotypes (Scary Monsters is "new wave" which makes it
AUTOMATICALLY more "commercial" than the Berlin trilogy, because
those had...*GASP*...SONGS ON THEM WITH NO LYRICS!).
But I just don't get the complaints about the rest. You say you like this album
best when it's weird but then hate "Because You're Young"? A
post-modern love song with some of
...and listen to this song again and tell me how it's not catchy/memorable.
That weird/hilarious "it's love back to front and no sides! (Like I say)
These pieces are BROOOKKEEEN!" pre-chorus bit isn't catchy? The actual
chorus isn't catchy? WHAT!?!?
...and then there's Teenage Wildlife, I mean, COME ON! Obviously the
arrangement and overall sound is ripped-off from Heroes, but it's hardly just
some pale imitation, and convincing yourself that it is strikes me as just some
silly "must be harsh" critic-thing. Bowie's vocals here are AMAZING
(some of the best in his career along with Heroes), and while to you it's
probably just some sign of how deranged Bowie fans are, a lot of them would
pick this as his best song. It's right up there in the top 3 for me. I mean,
not liking it is one thing, but just dismissing it is another altogether.
...and then!....and then!...there's the second It's No Game, and really that's
just an example of people having a rabid anti-Bowie bias. If George Harrison or
Sly & the Family Stone or Wilco does two versions of a song in purposely
contrasting styles, it's boner, but if Bowie does the same thing everybody
screams "liek wut's the point lol we alreddy got 1" as if they don't
get it.
I'm going to go lie down and yell at my pillow. You made me sad tonight.
Let’s Dance (1983)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Modern
Love”
The opening “Modern Love” is the best of three to me, mainly because (as I’ve said many times before) I like stupid happy catchy songs. The tune is snappy as all hell, and not a second of it is wasted. Wonderful, cheery melody, driving drumbeat (Played by real drums! In 1983! On a pop sellout album! I count this an upset), superb horn lines all over the place. Even the female backup singers work! And the long-ass sax solo may be the best thing in there. Just fantastic stuff. It’s a lowest-common-denominator, artistically empty pop song gift-wrapped for radio play with a little bow on top, but it’s so fucking well-written that it transcends its genre. Nearly as good is the slightly dark “China Girl,” which is actually a re-write of a song Dave wrote for Iggy Pop six years previously. We’ve got some “moody” synth backing that’s more or less an eighties cliché in here, and this, along with the more low-key, less POP! vocal stylings of our hero lead to that semi-“dark” vibe. Plus it’s got that “Shhhhhh…” line, so, um…yeah. Dark! Doesn’t matter, since the melody is again ace as all get out and everything is done tastefully and with an eye toward making a really good pop song instead of just a shitty one that will get played on the radio. Dave even somehow gets Stevie Ray Vaughan to provide a superb guitar solo near the end. See, it is possible to sell out without sucking. It’s not done all that often, but the first three tracks of this album prove that such a balancing act can theoretically be done. Hell, the title track even manages to maintain a bit of that “frigged-out funk” vibe that we saw on Scary Monsters, though clearly this time smoothed over for mass consumption. The public’s not gonna buy “Fashion,” clearly, but they will buy “Let’s Dance.” And yes, seven minutes is a little too long, but the groove is nice enough and the vocals interesting enough that I tolerate it. Make no mistake about it: the opening three singles on this record are really good.
The rest
more or less blows. I used to not mind
“Without You,” a harmless keyboard pop trifle, all that much, but then I read
Capn Marvel’s criticism that it’s an utterly shameless rip-off of Avalon-era Roxy Music, and by god he’s
right! So I mind it more now, though I
still say it’s the most passable of what’s left. “Ricochet” at least attempts to be interesting (I’ll give it that), but that’s it. Is it supposed to be the token song that’s a
little strange because this is a
So my
review ends up the same as everyone else who has ever listened to this album:
three great songs, five mediocre-to-bad ones, one bad haircut, the end. Most reviews of this (including, as you can
tell, mine) also tend to be pretty short and snappy, but this is not some sort
of tribute to the snappiness of “Modern Love.”
It’s because you have three really good pop songs that don’t require
much explanation and five songs that are bad enough to dismiss out of hand but
not bad enough to make you dwell on their badness. The material after “Let’s Dance” is just there.
You’re not gonna hate it, but you sure as shit won’t like it
either. It’s very blah. Thankfully, its lack of being truly rotten
means it doesn’t overshadow the eighteen minutes of goodness at the start.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Yeah, no need to comment on
this one. 3 good songs, the rest suck. I'd give it a 5/10. Yes I actually like
a
Modern Love is also my favorite here *hi-five* Gotta love that cheesy chorus!
China Girl is actually the most overrated; most disagree, but I think Iggy's
original version DESTROYS this one. I dunno if you've heard it, but if not,
atleast download it to hear how
Tonight (1984)
Rating: 2
Best Song: “Blue
Jean”
An insipid piece of garbage that
takes all the good vibes established by the surprisingly energetic and tasteful
(half of) Let’s Dance and flushes them
directly down the toilet. The funny
thing about this is it doesn’t even work as a pop sell-out album. The hit “Blue Jean” is a half-decent pop song
with a marginally catchy melody and horn lines a-plenty (like “Modern Love,”
but “maybe passably decent” instead of “a fucking fantastic pop song”), but I’m
just not sure how the rest of this pile is supposed to appeal to the general
public. Do they enjoy seven-minute,
meandering, atmospheric, new-agey ballads that do nothing and sound like
dentist office muzak? They don’t, you
say? Then what the hell is “Loving the
Alien” doing as the opening track?
What’s the demographic there? I
mean, there are other late
What, you
think I’m kidding? “Oh, Brad, it’s just
a crappy eighties pop album. People ate
up crappy eighties pop albums back in the day.
You’re being ridiculous.”
No! I’m not. This album wouldn’t even be enjoyable for
morons! It’s completely and totally
insipid. There are two tracks here that
sound like an unholy alliance of truckloads of valium, instantly dateable
eighties production values, and reggae. I’m serious!
Reggae! “Don’t Look Down” may be
the most insipidly boring and ridiculous song
Despite
what I said before, somehow this godforsaken thing gets no less insipid when it
finally gets a pulse halfway through.
“Neighborhood Threat” is a ridiculous social conscience rocker (On this
album! Two tracks after David murdered
“God Only Knows” and left its rotting carcass in a back alley!) that contains
the line “everybody always wants to kiss your trash” because apparently David
“8 Minute Song About Anal Sex in 1970”
This is an atrocious load of bullshit that you should avoid at all costs. It has one OK pop song and absolutely nothing else. The muzak-like first half of it may be the most maddeningly insipid stretch of music I’ve ever heard, while the more “rocking” second half is somehow not any better. Please, do not buy this album.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Eh, albums like this I can
hardly even hate like I should. It's so obvious that it was conceived, written,
recorded, and mixed in one 10-hour coke binge that I can't bring myself to
truly despise it. I mean, hey, atleast it's short.
Not that I could actually give this anything higher than a 2 myself, it's just
that instead of actively hating it, I just listened to it once and never again
like the disposable piece of nothing it is.
"Don't Look Down" and "Tonight" are actually more Iggy
covers, the former being all cheesy-jazz and shitty even in it's original
version. "Tonight" wasn't a masterpiece in it's original version
either (though it was very good), but
Blue Jean is about as good as a Let's Dance album track, meaning
"thoroughly medicore".
...and Loving the Alien I actually enjoy, maybe a bit muzak-y, but it's the
only thing here that seems like it's very existence isn't just Bowie joking
around while selling out at the same time.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Oh, I hate to be Mr.
Know-It-All, but I'll point out that "Neighborhood Threat" is also an
Iggy cover, also from Lust for Life (along with "Tonight"), also
completely stripped of it's good qualities, AND it actually includes the "kiss
your trash" line in the original version, so you can't really pin Bowie
for that one.
I'm surprised that neither you or CapnMarvel noticed that, but...who
knows...not everybody has time to listen to Iggy pop solo albums =/
(on that note, check out Lust For Life when you can, great freaking album)
Never Let Me Down (1987)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Never Let
Me Down”
More awful music from our man,
but at least this time it’s fast and stupid instead of slow and insipid. Nope, this one is just a run-of-the-mill
horrendous pile of synthesized eighties swill.
Everything is big and loud and fake and layered and shamelessly
attempting to keep up with the “times,” which in 1987 meant big, ugly, echoey,
fake music with no melody or personality.
It’s better than Tonight, but
it’s not like that’s saying much. I
don’t think a single instrument sounds good.
The drums are huge and reverbed to all hell. They keyboards all fall into the “heavenly”
background type or the instantly dateable, fake eighties type. The guitars are processed and sound like
total fake eighties plastic bullshit.
The horns are overloud and overbusy but play not a single note that does
anything positive for a single song, plus they’re so tinny I can barely tell
them apart from Wakeman-keyboards.
Melodies are nonexistent and are made up for by endless piling on of
shitty instruments that sound like shit and are fake. If the key word for Tonight was “insipid,” the key word for Never Let Me Down is “fake.”
I’ve heard worse and faker, yes, but this is the most stereotypically
fake eighties album in the
I’m not gonna spend much time talking about individual songs this time because they all sound exactly the same, but I will take the time to point out a couple that are especially odious. “Zeroes” is ridiculous because it starts out with what sounds like fake crowd noise until you listen closely and realize it’s just a bunch of squealy synthesizer sounds. This album is so fake even the crowd noise is synthesized! When the song starts breaking out tabla drums and a sitar in the background of its totally generic and awful eighties pop swill instrumental basis, one has to laugh, because what the fuck? Who do you think you are, George Harrison? Come on, Dave. Following “Zeroes” is “Glass Spider,” which is so ridiculous I don’t think I can adequately describe it to you. Points for being the only song on the album that’s not horrifically fake eighties swill, but five kajillion negative points for the comical “artistic” (on this album????) narration about the glass-like spider that used to live in China (“Oh, the Glass Spider had blue eyes almost like a human's. They shed tears at the wintered turn of the centuries”), not to mention the main part of the song, which may be the most fake-synthesized few minutes on the whole record (But it’s “moody,” so it’s not so bad, right? Nope! It sucks even more!). The only song here I like is the relatively gentle title track, which combines some surprisingly tasteful echoed guitar, subtle keyboards, a nice bit of harmonica, and a half-decent melody into a something that actually has some redeeming value, unlike the rest of this slop. The chorus of “Beat of Your Drum” is moderately hooky, but the rest of the song is as awful as everything else. I don’t know what else to say. This album is just really fucking bad.
So that’s two shitpiles in a row for David. Not good! One look at some footage from the Glass Spider Tour that supported this album shows just how far into the schlocky eighties morass Dave had fallen by this point. See, this is what happens when you follow trends so shamelessly. When the trends blow, so do you.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
I like this one even less
than Tonight, because while Tonight is 30 minutes, this one is nearly an hour.
Simple as that, really. Nearly an hour of music that's even more generic and
worthless than you would expect from a "worthless, generic 80's
album".
I will defend the title track as a major lost classic 'til the day I die,
though. His best song of the whole 80's, no shit. The production actually
sounds great and fits the song, and I'll be damned if that melody and
Unfortunately, the rest of this album is worthless. 2/10
Tin Machine (1989)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Tin
Machine”
Well, at least we can say that Dave cared about the critical savaging that both Tonight and Never Let Me Down received. Sure, he was still selling tons of records, including likely a fair number to people who had never bought a David Bowie album prior to “that one with ‘Modern Love’ on it,” but while Mr. Bowie certainly cares about record sales, you know he cares more than anything about being “hip,” so understandably he wanted to try and rehabilitate his critical reputation by lowering his persona a bit and, you know, not reciting “Glass Spider” in gold spandex pants in stadiums in Sweden and Portugal. To “lower his persona,” then, he grew a beard, put on a suit like a normal person might actually wear, and decided to play rhythm guitar in a distorted, European-style rock band that sounded about as different from “Zeroes” as possible. David’s compatriots in this endeavor were lead guitarist Reeves Gabriels and brothers Tony (bass) and Hunt (drums) Sales, the sons of one “Soupy Sales,” who was apparently once a most likely unfunny TV comedian of some note (I’m 26! Like I’ve heard of Soupy Fucking Sales?). So this record’s not even by “David Bowie.” It’s by “Tin Machine.” But since it’s 1989 and David Bowie sings lead on everything and gets writing credit on everything that’s not a John Lennon cover, I feel that skipping from Never Let Me Down to Black Tie White Noise would be a little silly. Plus, everyone would think that Dave just continued sucking gigantic piles of ass for a decade straight, unaware of those few years when he was in a perfectly OK rock band that released two albums I don’t hate. This would of course be unacceptable.
So anyway, Tin Machine. In the grand scheme of things, this is just a marginally above average rock album and nothing more than that, but considering the stuff released before and after it, if you’re listening to everything in order it’s like stumbling upon a lost Beatles album or something. I mean, it’s nothing special, but at least this is clearly the work of a band, and not a small army of hack session musicians and producers under the delusion that the eighties didn’t completely blow. Reeves Gabriels is an interesting guitarist (he often goes for noise and/or atmosphere over the riff, even when he has a perfectly nice riff or chord sequence to work with; case in point, “I Can’t Read,” where the guitars in the chorus have no business sounding that odd yet somehow work anyway), while the Sales brothers are fine and dandy enough as well. One thing I like about the record (and something which I probably like partially because of what I just listened to) is that, despite being completely European and “cold” in character, the rock on display is actually pretty sloppy in places. “I Can’t Read” is again an example of this, but so is nearly everything else. I read somewhere that a lot of these songs were actually done in one take, which (if true) is a) undoubtedly cool of Bowie considering the processed bullshit he had been crapping out so recently and b) something I’m not surprised at in the least. Even if not all the songs on here are ace (and believe me they aren’t), I can tell you that nothing sounds “slicked over” at all. Even the slower, softer tunes like “Prisoner of Love” and “Amazing” have interesting guitar effects and loud (organic) drums that totally sound live in the way they were recorded.
The songs themselves,
though, are a mixed bag. Most of the
stuff here is pretty one-dimensional (the exception being the blues opener
“Heaven’s in Here,” which is average enough to relegate to a parenthesis such
as this), and differences in tempo are often the best way for me to distinguish
for you, the reader. Of the “fast”
tunes, my favorite is undoubtedly the title track, which does the whole
“efficient, cold European rock” thing better than anything else here and even
manages to get a fair amount of energy into its monotone “Tin Machine! Tin Machine!” verses. “Under the God” is also a decent track, but
part of me thinks that if you got rid of the guitar distortion and political
lyrics and added a bunch of terrible eighties production effects you’d have
something from Never Let Me Down. Perhaps this is a stupid thing to complain
about (I mean, wasn’t the production the main problem on that dungheap
anyway?), but I do want more from a song’s chorus than “UNDER THE GOD!!!!”
shouted a bunch of times. I like the moody
ballad “Prisoner of Love” more. More
interesting that one is, mainly because of some truly odd Gabriels guitar
effects (which of course I mentioned in the last paragraph, thus proving once
and for all that I am a terrible writer).
The aforementioned John Lennon cover is “Working Class Hero,” and count
me as a cautious supporter of the pseudo-blues rock treatment the band gives
it. It’s interesting, at least, you
know? It also continues the whole
“social commentary” lyrics thing, which is all over this album. Sometimes it works (“Under the God,” despite
my criticisms). Sometimes, however, it
does not. For instance, “
The second half of the record is where things start to get a little dodgy for me. “Pretty Thing” and “Video Crime” are just disorganized (sloppy is fine; disorganized is not), while songs like “Run” and “Sacrifice Yourself” smell thoroughly of “generic.” I like the closer “Baby Can Dance,” though. It’s got some nice guitar effects and a moderately memorable chorus. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe many of these songs in specific detail. Decent distorted European rock music with somewhat iffy songwriting is what you’re gonna get from start to finish, really, and while that’s not gonna set anyone’s world on fire, the overwhelming acceptability of this record does make it a welcome change for the David Bowie reviewer after slogging through the man’s last two solo albums. It goes without saying that not too many people bought this (and those that did probably bought it for the novelty factor and/or were thoroughly disappointed when it didn’t sound like “Blue Jean”), but I’m pretty sure Dave didn’t care. If for no other reason than that, I’m at least glad this record (as well as its follow-up) exists.
Tin Machine II (1991)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “If There
Is Something”
The second Tin Machine record
album is better than the first in some ways, but worse in others, and thus
turns just about as “moderately OK” as the first. Exciting words, I know! I bet you’re all rushing out to buy this
album you probably can’t even find anywhere RIGHT NOW!!! It does have a cool cover, though. Those are kouros
statues! That’s ancient Greek shit! Come on, you know you love that shit! Also, according to Wikipedia (and thus this is likely incorrect), on the American
version of the album cover, the statues’ johnsons were snapped off, but on the
European version they were left to flap in the wind! God, I love
Anyway, back to the record at hand, which you can only order an import copy of from Amazon last time I checked (but you can get the special 10th anniversary edition of Black Tie White Noise there right now!!!!!). On the whole, it’s a lot slicker and less seemingly “off-the-cuff” than the first Tin Machine release. I still have no idea whether the last album’s tracks were actually recorded in one take, but this doesn’t seem that far-fetched in theory. On this album, however, I would believe no such thing. There are layered backing vocals and tighter arrangements and occasionally those heavenly-sounding backing acoustic guitar strumming that the late eighties and early nineties was fucking full of. On the whole, this is a development I dislike. The sloppiness of the first one probably hid some of its quality, but it also made it kind of a fun exercise. The less good songs were never truly awful because at least Gabriels was firing off something cool or…hell, I dunno, maybe Hunt Sales was doing something mildly entertaining. The songs may have been a mixed bag, but overall the consistency of the album was at least decent. No major gag jobs, you know?
That’s not
the case this time. First of all, the
good songs here are clearly better
than the good songs on the first one (well, two of them are). “You Belong in Rock & Roll” is easily the best
Nothing matches those two, but a number of others are at least decent, including in the opening two pop-rockers “Baby Universal” and “One Shot” and the interesting “Betty Wrong.” “Goodbye Mr. Ed,” like “Baby Can Dance” from the last album, again ends proceedings on a nice, unpretentious, melodic note. I don’t really like the new-agey “Amlapura,” though, and some of the other tunes near the end don’t quite measure up (I’m looking at you, frankly disturbing child prostitution song “Shopping for Girls”), but most of what’s left is more of the “eh” variety than the “actively shit” variety.” To be honest, outside of “You Belong in Rock & Roll” and “If There is Something,” the “good” songs aren’t great or anything. Just, you know, “moderately OK,” like the stuff I don’t like as much is “moderately not so OK” (except “Shopping for Girls,” which actually blows). The songs that Hunt Sales writes and sings, though, need to go away. “Stateside” is a frighteningly generic blues tune featuring Hunt’s terrible, whiney voice and little else, while the really frighteningly generic acoustic ballad “Sorry” is even worse. Why Hunt Sales is allowed to write and sing two songs on an album released by a band featuring David Bowie I don’t know. At least it’s something I won’t have to hear again, since this album tanked even worse than the first one and soon afterwards Dave went back to making terrible solo albums.
Anyway, even with the two Hunt Sales songs, this one’s still a decent record that I kinda like just about as much as I kinda like the first Tin Machine album. It obviously goes without saying that I never would have thought of getting copies of these albums were David not on lead vocals and rhythm guitar (I’m fairly certain that there aren’t any other Reeves Gabriels projects I’ll feel the need to check out any time soon), but hell, I guess they’re a nice respite of decency in the middle of by far the worst period of Dave’s career. A good way to regroup before listening to Dave take on nineties techno trends. You know that’s gonna be awesome.
Black Tie White Noise (1993)
Rating: 2
Best Song: “Lucy
Can’t Dance”
David’s first solo album in six years is such an unholy pile of shit that I find it clearly worse than Tonight and quite possibly the second worst record I’ve yet to review on this website (The Clash’s Cut the Crap remains the worst and won’t be getting passed until I find something worth giving a 1 to). This record is horrid. On it Bowie dives headfirst into that kind of icky early nineties suave dance club horseshit that I know everyone reading this right now remembers being the hotness for a little while back in the day and which everyone I’m sure has blocked so completely out of their mind that one listen to this rotting bag of pig urine would bring back memories too unpleasant to even mention. It doesn’t even have songs. Christ, at least Tonight had songs. This is just one extremely long (66 minutes! Thanks, CD age!) and extremely unpleasant club jam that’s not even enjoyable if you just took a hit of ecstasy because it’s not even cool, acid dance music or something. It’s club music for guys in sharp dress suits who work in investment banks and spend their evenings cutting up lines of cocaine with their American Express platinum card during a clearly-defined six month period around 1992 or 1993. I suppose there’s supposed to be some “soul” in there, but this “soul” is mostly expressed by David’s insistence on playing a really bad saxophone solo in every fucking track on the album (which is great because he only actually sings in like half of them). When this album tries something other than a really bad club song, like on the title track or “Miracle Goodnight,” it just plods along with one poorly thought-out either pseudo-funk guitar or pseudo-interesting (you know, not actually interesting) noise bit while Dave chants something with no melody whatsoever over the top. This is not mentioning the one or two slowwww club jams to sway back and forth with your personal coked-out hooker to. There is not a single track on this album that’s even passable. The only reason I think it’s better than Cut the Crap is that, for what it’s trying to be, it’s actually “constructed” not half badly. It’s not like there are signs of total incompetence in the production or execution of this material (just really, really, really bad taste in music). It’s all smoothed over to the point where large chunks of it would probably be acceptable as elevator or dentist office muzak. If I turn it down low enough and pay as little attention as possible, it doesn’t bother me. I can’t say this about Cut the Crap. Plus Mick Ronson plays guitar a few times and he still sounds OK, so I suppose that’s something.
This record
is fourteen tracks long, but one song is a remix of another, “The Wedding Song”
is a redux of “The Wedding” with lyrics, and there are four covers. So really, there are eight
The last thing I’m gonna say is that I picked “Lucy Can’t Dance” (which is apparently a “bonus track,” as if people were begging for “bonus tracks” from David Bowie in 1993) as best track because it’s fast and incredibly stupid, and these qualities make it better than any of the sixty-odd minutes preceding it. This is not something I would say about a good album.
I don’t feel like talking about this fucking thing anymore. I hate it. It sucks. It sucks and it stinks and it sucks. Ziggy Stardust isn’t walking through that door. Station to Station isn’t walking through that door. Heroes isn’t walking through that door. And if they do, they’ll be old and grey.
P.S.: You can buy the special 10th Anniversary Edition of Black Tie White Noise, complete with remastered sound and an entire disc of bonus tracks, remixes, and rarities right here!
P.P.S.: Somehow, I got through the entire review without mentioning the fact that the title contains the single most inappropriate use of the phrase “White Noise” in the history of the English language. If Coldplay titled their next record Mindblowingly Original Guitar Feedback Explosion Cumshot, that would still not be one tenth as inappropriate as Dave’s using the phrase “White Noise” in the title of this record.
The Buddha Of Suburbia (1995)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Dead
Against It”
Soundtrack to a BBC miniseries of some sort that originally came out in 1993 but didn’t make its way onto US record store shelves until 1995, which means Dave was working on this perfectly nice, acceptable album at the same time as he was recording 66 minutes of his farting into a microphone to a club dance beat and calling it Black Tie White Old Unhip British Guy. I like how, since Let’s Dance, Dave’s been unable to put together an album that’s even listenable unless he’s convinced no one’s listening. How else do you explain his three big solo albums from the period being as awful as Tonight, Never Let Me Down, and Black Tie White Noise, while his two albums with Tin Machine and his BBC miniseries soundtrack all turned out OK? “I’m making this one for people to buy, so let’s make sure it blows, everyone!” “This is just a toss-off project, so I guess I can put decent music on it.” Were the public’s tastes so bad that Dave was only able to make something OK when not gearing it for public consumption? Or did Dave just think the public’s tastes were that bad? Either way, it’s a fascinating question, and something I would surely dive into were any of the three “good” albums from this period better than Young Americans.
Anyway, like I said, this is a nice album. Not earth-shattering or different or even really interesting (like, for instance, the Tin Machine stuff was interesting because Dave hadn’t rocked out in so long), but nice. A bunch of it is filled with go-nowhere, atmospheric, “soundtrack” music that pretty much blows (“South Horizon,” “The Mysteries,” “Ian Fish, U.K. Heir”), and yeah, that’s unfortunate, but the record also has a handful of nicely constructed, well-thought out, intelligent pop songs that are probably the best “songs” Dave’s made since the opening trio from Let’s Dance. Take the title track, for instance. Pleasant guitars, well-done vocals, nice buildup, tastefully done big, honking chorus part. Nice work all around. Nothing special, and the whole thing has a bit of the “old man dinosaur pseudo-new-agey” kind of production feel to it with the unobtrusive synths and echoey guitar melodies, but the song is nice and unpretentious enough that it’s OK. Hell, it’s OK both times! It comes up at the end, too, in what I assume must have been the closing credits, because it’s a bit more overdramatic than the first take and has a bigger guitar solo. Not enough of a difference to be interesting, though. I know, this is very entertaining writing I’m giving you right now.
Moving on, “Strangers When We Meet” seems to have been a single of some sort, and it’s another nicely done pop song with echoey guitars and unobtrusive synths and a pretty solid melody in the chorus. These songs are not “hip” in the least, but considering what “Trying to be Hip” David was coughing up around this time, that’s undoubtedly a good thing. A song that others seem to praise but I don’t get is “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad,” which sounds like ugly, poorly-done heavy rock to me. Just because someone famous happens to be making pussy, echoey pop songs and ass-poor dance music at some time doesn’t mean that a heavy guitar song done at the same time has to kick ass. It could just suck, and that’s what this one does. Are the bass line and drum beat supposed to give it some sort of a “dance” basis? If so, they fail, and if not, they fail at whatever they were supposed to be doing. Also, I mean, there’s no melody! “Shine, shine, shine!” and the song title are mumbled over and over, and that’s it for lyrics! So no, I don’t like it. Of course, I do find something to enjoy in the usually reviled “artistic” techno track “Sex and the Church,” which really isn’t even a song. It’s a vamp based on one drum machine rhythm, a synthesized, obviously clubby bass thing, and David’s thoroughly treated vocals chanting out “sex…and the church…” in what I can only assume is his vocal support of the two things being used in combination. But I dunno, its oddness works for me. Remember, though, I have bad taste in music.
My favorite here is “Dead Against it,” which may not have the biggest melody in the world, but books along at a nice pace with its faintly electronic drumming and features all sorts of beautiful, echoey guitar interplay that goes beyond the “pleasant” of the previous songs mentioned as “good” and moves straight into that “interesting” level I always enjoy. Good for David! That’s more interesting guitar playing than Tonight, Never Let Me Down, and Black Tie White Noise have together! Good thing you saved it for a BBC soundtrack CD that no one bought! Solid move there!
The last thing that can be described as a song, “Untitled No. 1,” is a pretty horrendous club track that sounds like a refugee from that other album David was working on in 1993. It’s better than more or less everything on that album, yes, but it’s not like that’s saying much. I really hate that album, you know? And while the bad memories of “I Feel Free” being treated as a vapid club track may have led me at times to sound unnecessarily complementary towards what’s really a handful of decent-to-good songs amidst a sea of misfires and incidental soundtrack music, it’s not like I’ve heard a handful of decent-to-good songs on a David Bowie album for a while, so I’ll take what I can get. This record is incredibly uneven, but it’s decent, and there really are a few songs that it’d be tough for too many people to dislike. Acceptable job, David! Now, back to making inferior albums you figure someone’s listening to.
1. Outside (1995)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Outside”
Thankfully tolerable after the ear diarrhea that was Black Tie White Noise, but the man still hasn’t made a solo album that’s not a movie soundtrack I can recommend since Let’s Dance (and even that was only decent because of the three singles). I will give him credit for one thing here, namely that he’s at least given up on being a completely commercial whore douche with his solo albums and is trying to be “artistic” again. Problem is this new “artistic” approach leads to an overlong, convoluted, frustrating mess of a record that I’m still not convinced has any good songs on it. Some like to call this Dave’s “industrial” album, and sure, there are a few songs with heavily distorted “industrial” guitars (most notably “Heart’s Filthy Lesson” and “Hallo Spaceboy,” not coincidentally both released as singles) and he toured as a co-headliner with Nine Inch Nails and all to support it, but most of this just strikes me as self-consciously “modern”-sounding meandering art-rock hibbity jibbity with a bunch of sound effects as easily dated to 1995 as Jennifer Aniston’s hair. You know Brian Eno produced this? I guess you could have probably guessed that. This isn’t really Nile Rodgers’ bag.
Common
criticisms of this album include “it’s too fucking long” and “it doesn’t make
any fucking sense” and “all the segues make me want to jab a fucking pencil
into my eye.” I will dispute none of
these. This thing is nineteen tracks and
seventy-four minutes of stuff with no
melody that sounds like itself, and this includes a worse-than-the-version-on-Buddha-of-Suburbia remix of “Strangers
When We Meet” that I suppose must have been necessary because Bowie’s only
decent solo album since 1993 still hadn’t been released in America two full
years after it was recorded. It also
includes numerous awful spoken-word segues which feature Dave’s pretending to
be characters who play supposedly important roles in the album’s supposed story
(Oh, I didn’t mention this is a concept album?
Well, then! More on that later)
by sending his voice through effects boxes that make it sound less like a voice
and more like something Cedric Bixler-Zavala would find interesting. The liner notes (which I do not have) speak
of a “non-linear Gothic drama hyper-cycle” or some such bullshit, and the album
is titled 1. Outside because it was
originally supposed to be part of a multi-record pile of pretentious badness
(the second “volume” apparently would have been called 2. Contamination) which
If the
extremely harsh nature of this review thus far doesn’t seem to completely jive
with the mediocre-but-not-awful 5 rating I’ve pasted above, it’s because
listening to and reviewing all this late-period
So yes,
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Pretty much agree with you on
this one, a bit of decent music wrapped up in industrial noise, way-too
long songs, and ridiculous segues that are a chore to sit through even once.
Still, I'll give it a 6 for having, by my count, three great songs:
- "I Have Not Been to
- "Outside", which features a very nice hook in
- "Strangers When We Meet", this version of which is my favorite
post-Scary Monsters Bowie song. Really beautiful heartfelt old-man ballad, and
this version beats the previous one by having far superior
Earthling (1997)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Looking
For Satellites”
I decided to take a day off from
working today (and by “working” I mean “doing reading for my PhD exams during
the summer in between procrastinating most of the time instead”) because
there’s been a lot on my mind and I somehow thought the best way to get over
some of that was to write another fucking review of another fucking late-period
David Fucking Bowie fucking album, and I’m all set to sit down and start
writing when fucking L.A. gets hit with a fucking magnitude 5.8 (Note: Later
fucking downgraded to fucking 5.4) fucking earthquake! Seriously!
If there’s ever a sign that god does not like a particular record album,
it’s that the earth itself starts violently shaking the moment you’re sitting
down to write about it, isn’t it?
Thankfully the epicenter was near
Anyway, more immediately interesting yet clearly worse than its predecessor, Earthling is where Davy Jones continues shitting on his legacy by grafting himself onto possibly the most short-lived trends he’d yet deemed worthy of his musical interpretation, namely drum ‘n’ bass and something called “jungle,” which I’d never heard of prior to reading about this album and which apparently consists of a drum machine playing the same hyper-speed rhythm over and over again and doing nothing else. The super-fast and super-loud electronic percussion doohickies and heavily distorted guitar mucus that infests this album seems strangely appropriate to an earthquake. It’s a very hectic-sounding album. There is a lot going on, and much of it seems patently unnecessary and makes what may have been decent songs sound like messy, loud, self-consciously “modern” trash that sucks. This is a shame because there are a few songs here that may have been good had David left them the fuck alone and not layered 500 pounds of ultra-distorted electronic soup over everything because (perhaps) he’s afraid his songs aren’t good enough to sell without slathering whatever the editors of Spin happen to be listening to at the time all over every fucking thing on the album.
Much of
this “good” material occurs at the beginning.
Take the opener “Little Wonder,” for instance. Remove the warp-speed electronic drums and
whacked-out feedbacky distorted guitars from it and leave just the keyboards
and vocal melody. You know what you’d
have? A nice, simple song! Instead, you get this galloping mess of a
thing that you have to listen to five times for the decentness to come out of
it. Or “Battle for
Much of the
second half doesn’t even have the skeletons of good songs the first half had
and thus degenerates into a morass of embarrassing electronic production
clichés. The dance tracks “Dead Man
Walking” and “Law (Earthlings on Fire)” are particularly odious, but after
track 4 the only song worth mentioning is the Trent Reznor collaboration “I’m
Afraid of Americans,” which I will give credit for being a song with electronics in the verses not just playing the same “jungle” rhythm that’s in every other
damn song and a guitar riff (that, judging by its sound, was likely written by
Reznor) in its chorus that seems to exist for the same of being a riff and not
just making “hip” noise. I also really dig the “ah ah ah, ah ah, ah ah,
ah ah ah!” vocal things in the verses.
All of these admirable things make the mediocre quality of the song as a
whole disappointing (the chorus sounds obvious and is extremely mediocre), but
at least there are some good things
there, you know? Outside of that one
vocal tick in the verses, none of them are all that super, but I’m gonna take
what I can get, OK? I just wish more of
this album sounded like the incredibly cool “Looking for Satellites,” which is
the only song here where David doesn’t sound like he’s making an ass out of
himself or covering a Nine Inch Nails B-side.
The drum machines play at a normal speed, and the swirling keyboards and
tasteful guitar feedback solo things create a very nice musical stew over which David does this cool
“Nowhere…shampoo…TV…come back…” chanting thing that fits the music to a T. It’s pretty great, actually, and probably the
first song since Scary Monsters on a
Now that I’ve moved my roommate’s computer away from directly under his printer at his request for fear of aftershocks, I can sum up this review by stating the obvious: David Bowie needs to stop latching himself onto trends with a shelf-life of less than six months if he wants his albums to be taken seriously more than a few weeks after their release. Hell, this one may have had more good material than 1. Outside if the man had just left it alone and let the songs breathe. There’s so much unnecessary clutter here that whatever good songs he may have written are choked by the piles of “hip,” “modern” “production” that I’m sure David thought the kids were gonna dig right into but didn’t because in 1997 David Bowie was an old man and kids didn’t want to listen to him try to incorporate a trend that was probably old before Earthling even came out. “Looking for Satellites” is honestly great, and the one that Trent Reznor wrote is at least tolerable, but the rest ranges from “decent songs made bad by needless overproduction” to “horseshit that didn’t need the overproduction to suck, but hey, it might as well suck even more, right?” I continue to dislike reviewing late-period David Bowie.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
I haven't actually heard this
album yet, because though I am something of a Bowie-lover, even I haven't
bothered actually checking out his entire 90's catalogue yet (I HAVE the album,
just won't get around to listening to it until I listen to...uhm...pretty much
everything else I possess)
But to make one quick correction, the album version of "I'm Afraid of
Americans" has nothing to do with Trent Reznor, he did a remix of it that
was released as the single version. Since you're not wondering, basically all
he did was replace the massive guitar riff in the chorus with some shitty electronic
noise in what was seemingly an effort to make the song inferior.
I've never bought either version of the song as a
Hours… (1999)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Seven”
More proof that Old Man Bowie is
much more pleasant and tolerable when he doesn’t try very hard, Hours… is bland, formulaic,
VH-1-approved adult pop that attaches itself to no here-today-gone-tomorrow
electronic fads and thus is able to play all the way through without making the
listener angry once. True, there’s not
much more I can say about it, but is it a bad thing that I’m just happy to get
that from
As mentioned before, a few songs rise above the “eh, it doesn’t irk me” level of the bulk of the record. The opener “Thursday’s Child,” loping tempo and synth-strings and whispery backing vocals and all, is a lovely and gentle way to open the album. “Survive” is a decent one as well, despite the obviously electronic drums in there. Do you know why I don’t mind them this time? They’re quiet! They’re unobtrusive! They don’t distract from the song, you know? And even if it’s just a pretty but ultimately uneventful adult pop song whose best attribute is some sort of muted guitar solo mixed even lower than the crappy horns, it’s still very nice. Unlike the Earthling material, these songs are allowed to breathe. The best of the bunch is “Seven,” a gentle (the key word for this album is “gentle,” everyone), slow little acoustic-based ditty that may the best “little unpretentious pop song” David’s done in years. It’s got some of the VH-1-approved adult synth backing, of course, but it’s quiet, limited, and tasteful, and I don’t mind it one bit. Just a good, pretty little song.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for material I can specifically recommend, though I’ll say it’s admirable that Dave’s managed to produce a record with so little I can specifically shit on either. The rest of the first side is nice and agreeable, though not especially eventful. The second side is worse, mainly because Dave gets Reeves Gabriels (yup, he’s still around) to break out his heavier guitar tones and attempt to rock a little bit, which on a pleasant adult pop album for old people such as this one you know is gonna be misguided. I don’t really like anything on the second side, to be honest, but there’s nothing embarrassing there either, which should probably be seen as a victory of sorts. The closing “The Dreamers” does away with much of the pseudo-rock and returns to the agreeable pleasantness of side 1, but it’s not like anyone cares by that point. Most people probably stop paying attention about halfway through “The Pretty Things are Going to Hell,” which may be the one time this album does manage to piss me off, though thankfully only a little.
So a pleasant, agreeable, unobtrusive album gets what I think is a pleasant, short, unobtrusive review. Nothing here will grab you by the balls and yank like David used to love to do (especially on, say, “Moonage Daydream”), but it’s perfectly, you know, OK. Yeah.
Heathen (2002)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Cactus”
A thoroughly acceptable and professional
album that sounds like Bowie’s great comeback until you listen a few more times
and realize it’s boring as hell and doesn’t have any good songs on it. I suppose Heathen
gives me the least material with which to make fun of
Both of those tunes don’t even sound that bad while you’re listening to them, either. It’s after you listen to them that you look back at “Sunday” and go “oh, shit, nothing actually happened in that song” or you look back at “Slip Away” and go “oh, shit, that was a mediocre ‘Quicksand’ or ‘Life on Mars?’ rip-off.” Annoyingly, this entire album’s like that. It’s so professional and cleanly-produced (Dave got old friend and seventies producer Tony Visconti back on board) that you don’t realize how crushingly average and unmemorable everything is until you look back on it and don’t fucking remember anything. Every time I finish listening to this album, I try to think back to the songs I like, and I realize the record doesn’t have any except for the Pixies cover (“Cactus”), which is an average track from an album I don’t even like as much as some of the Pixies’ others, is clearly weaker here in its old-man-synthy version than it was on its original recording, and still manages to kick the living snot out of every other song on the album.
Finding songs I can point to as actively sucking my ass is a useless exercise because there are so few. I suppose “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spacecraft” is pretty awful in its subpar techno tendencies, but having listened to Black Tie White Noise so often a week ago I know it could be far, far worse. David’s vocals in the chorus of “Afraid” are creaky and genuinely terrible, and the fact that the strings in there sound like they come directly from the showtuney chunk in the middle of Ziggy Stardust doesn’t help (not the most flattering comparison, you see). I suppose “I Would Be Your Slave” is OK with its insistent strings and shuffly drums, and for some reason I like the ridiculous “dooooo…wap, wap, wah-oooooo” things in the otherwise generally asinine “Everyone Says Hi,” but for the most part this record is a bunch of well-polished mediocrity with a surface level of decency that wears away when you actually pay attention to it. I suppose I like it better than Outside, the other overlong, overdone mediocrity from this man’s catalog I gave a 5 to, but that’s mostly because of the silly segues and dumb story in that one. Plus this one’s actually twenty minutes shorter than Outside, meaning it’s not actually overlong at all (nope, it just feels like it), so I guess that may be a plus.
I dunno, I wish I liked this album more, since it’s clear Dave had nothing in mind besides making a good album when he recorded it (refreshing coming from him), but it’s not my fault that he tries way too hard, nor that the whole thing is so mannered as to lose all semblance of human emotion, nor that the songs aren’t very good, nor that he so obviously calls attention to this last fact by including a goddamn Pixies cover. Plus, like I said at the start, this album is boring! Really, really boring! And sure, Hours… wasn’t the most exciting record in the world either, but it did have a few honest-to-goodness good songs on there, boring or not, that were written by David Bowie himself, something this record sadly lacks. Plus, the album cover scares the living crap out of me, so it’s not like that helps.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
There's two schools of
thought on this album, one of which (commonly subscribed to by the Bowie hater)
is that it's a mediocre re-hashing of past glories, the other (surprisingly
subscribed to by George Starostin) is that it's a great re-hashing of past
glories.
I'm sure I don't even have to tell you where I stand. Yeah, "Slipping
Away" is a "Life On Mars?" rewrite, "Slow Burn" is a
"Heroes"/"Teenage Wildlife" rewrite (I love both these
songs despite this), there's two covers (neither of which beat the originals
despite the acclaim for them), and the closing title track is a ridiculously
amelodic non-song, but you either bash the album for these things or accept
them and get on to enjoying it.
So if one hates this album, it's pretty understandable. Me? I had all these
songs memorized after about two listens, and I listen to this album nearly as
much as
Some random thoughts:
- "Afraid" is kind of half-assed and off-key, one of the weaker songs
along w/the title track.
- "5:15 The Angels Have Gone" and "Everyone Says Hi" are
very pretty and genuinely touching melodic ballads (what exactly is asinine
about the latter?)
- "...Gemini Spacecraft" is just a novelty tune, I think hating it is
a sign you're taking it too seriously. The techno background here is CLEARLY
meant to be kitschy and semi-ironic (unlike his 90's trend-hopping), so I find
it along with
- "I Would Be Your Slave" is the kind of melodyless adult contemporary
bore that I wouldn't blame anyone for disliking, but I personally find it
gorgeous, and think the chorus is quite nice.
I give it a 9.
Reality (2003)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Days”
Finally. Now, Reality may not be the greatest album
ever recorded, or even in the top handful of albums Bowie has ever made, but
this is the first one since Scary
Monsters 23 goddamn years ago that I can honestly say I enjoy and would
actually listen to for pleasure
outside of simply to write a shitty review about it. I tend to see this one and Heathen grouped together a lot as
Bowie’s two recent “old man albums” where he decides to get creative again and
goes into recording them with no intent beyond making a good, interesting album
and looks back on his career and yadda yadda yadda. While I can understand the impetus for
linking them together (their being released only a year apart, which has become
downright odd for big-name artists nowadays, certainly doesn’t hurt), after
listening to the two of them together so much recently, I find any similarities
between them to be absolutely crushed under the weight of their rather drastic
differences. Heathen was boring and slow and ponderous and had lots of boring
backing synths and sounded more like the work of a tired old fart than any
other album yet released by Mr. Bowie (and that counts the adult pop schlock
(that I for some reason don’t seem to mind all that much) of Hours…).
Reality, while not the most
upbeat album in the world or anything, is actually fun to listen to! It’s
neither ponderous nor overdone and contains large quantities of neither
needless “atmospheric” backing synths nor silly electronic doo-dads. For the most part, it’s tight, compact and
well-constructed. It has a bunch of
snappy pop-rock songs of varying tones that are all pretty good. It actually sounds cool (another thing
It’s not great or anything, of course, and it’s
certainly lacking in truly classic songs, but for the most part this record
maintains a level of consistent quality we haven’t seen since the late
seventies from the guy. Think the consistently
solid, slightly odd pop-rock of Lodger
and you’re on the right track in terms of quality, and while I may not have
been Mr. Enthusiastic when I was reviewing that one, the guy had just released Heroes then! Like I’m gonna get excited for “consistently
good” when I just heard that album? The
best album I’ve had the pleasure of listening to since Scary Monsters is Let’s Dance,
and a full 60% or so of that sucked complete ass, so excuse me if I seem
unnaturally effusive over an album I’m giving a 7 to. I’ve been listening to a lot of shitty music
lately. So I feel that listening to Black Tie White Noise like seven fucking times has earned me the
right to get happy when I hear the swirling opener “New Killer Star” or the
bouncy pop of “Never Get Old,” even if neither of these tunes is even in the
ballpark of anything
Unsurprisingly,
the album occasionally bites it pretty hard, like the horrific, go-nowhere mood
piece ballad “The Loneliest Guy” or whatever the nine-minute old-fart-jazz
closer “Bring Me the Disco King” is supposed to be, but at least this doesn’t
happen often, you know? The super-speed hard rocker title track has
never done much for me, either (at least except for that part where it changes
to acoustic guitars for five seconds), though others seem to like it because “
So, thankfully I get to finish this page on a (relative) high note after probably sounding like a total curmudgeon for the last ten or fifteen reviews. This is really a very solid album. Nothing spectacular or even particularly great in the context of David Bowie’s career, but it’s certainly the man’s best work since at least Scary Monsters and his most consistent since at least Lodger. All things considered, that’s pretty good! And thank god I’m done reviewing this man now. No more gigantic catalogs for a little while. I just have no time in grad school, unless you want me to review like two artists a year. Now go buy Station to Station and Heroes.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
This album, more than any
other in the man's discography, strikes me as overwhelmingly decent. I guess
the general lack of references to his past pleases most Bowie skeptics, so I'm
not surprised at it's generally being rated higher than Heathen, but I really
find it to be a step down.
Oh well, I guess it's all a matter of different viewpoints and perspectives.
The covers here are both pretty good, actually some of the best songs on the
album. "Pablo Picasso" has the chance to be the definitive
version of the song, but
"New Killer Star", "Fall Dog Bombs the Moon", and the title
track are all considered minor classics by some, but why? They're just bland
rockers with no real melodies. Like The Rolling Stones circa A Bigger
Bang,
Highlights (besides the covers)? "Never Get Old" while a wee bit
cheesy in the verses, has a really cool groove and an ecstatic sounding and
quite catchy chorus, and I actually like "Bring Me the Disco King" a
lot, which probably voids my opinion in a lot of peoples' eyes. Yeah, I know
when a song is like 8 minutes long it really SHOULD BE a classic or bust, but I
find this song's pretty good-quality still makes it better than most of the
rest here. At least it's not a bland "
Despite how negative I just sounded, I'd agree with your 7.