desperately chilled
i'd say low, ziggy, and station to station as starting points, but you can't really do any wrong with anything from space oddity up to and including scary monsters. just go in order, enjoy the ride. and don't dismiss outside.
as a first record, hunky dory has obvious career highlights but some real big misses to weed through. 'quicksand,' 'mars,' 'queen bitch,' and 'belway brothers' carry that record in favor of dreck like kooks/fill your heart/eight line poem/blargh.
Last edited by frankie teardrop; 03-06-2013 at 01:12 PM.
Member
If you want to go to compilations. Changesbowie is a nice place to start as it was where it started for me. For albums, start with Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and then go into Station to Station, the Berlin trilogy, and Scary Monsters. Then go for everything else in the 70s and then go after everything else he's done. It's really one of the best catalogs of any artist out there though are some duds like Tonight and Never Let Me Down.Originally Posted by konkelo
desperately chilled
and even those two albums have one great track each (loving the alien/time will crawl) if you can stomach some shameless 80s production.
really though, am i the only one who thinks hunky dory is an incredibly flawed album? 'kooks' was awesome when i was 12 and that's about it. fill your heart and eight line poem never even had that going for them though...
Last edited by frankie teardrop; 03-06-2013 at 01:20 PM.
Member
I love "Kooks" and still do. Aside from "Loving the Alien", "Blue Jeans" is only other good song in Tonight while Never Let Me Down does have a couple of other good singles in its title track and "Day In, Day Out" despite the 80s production.
Stubby Member
This kid is impressive:
He is pretty spot on except about Dancign Out in Space... I love that track, it reminds my of everything good about 'Modern Love'.
The more I listen to this album, the more I love it... lyrically it's dark as fuck, which adds to my love of it.
Heat is a great closer, the bass in that song sounds like it was lifted from The Motel.
In fact there are spots all over the album that sound transported from earlier work, which adds to the charm. Whether it's a riff from Fame in Dirty Boys or the vibe of The Man who Sold the World (album) in How does the Grass Grow.
To me, and I know I'm buzzing still about new Bowie, this album stands with the best of his work. It's a solid album where it's weak points would be considered strong points for most other artists.
Like most people, most of the album didn't grab me at first, but it has me now... and it's not letting go.
So to those who haven't listened yet, I'd say try to go in without expectations and within two to three listens you'll know to believe the hype.
desperately chilled
just got this in the mail, a nice workaround for the excerpts from outside vinyl missing this otherwise gem of a song:
green vinyl, too- for those who are into that sort of thing!
Stubby Member
Thanks for the recommendations about the albums! I'll go and check out some of those soon!
BACKROLLS?!
iTunes sales:
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Hairy Member
...and another day (words from a db junkie)
With no ego, I can say I am an authority on davidbowie. I have my factoids, opinions, fetishes & blasphemies about every nook and cranny of his ocean-deep discography. Having finally overcome my initial bewilderment of The Next Day I can say it is his best work since Heathen & Reality. From a more distant & useful perspective though, it is a masterpiece among his other dozen or so masterpieces.
The album is dampened only from some b-sides that made it into the middle of the album. As Nick said, “Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!” Nevertheless, The Next Day pummels the body with its relentless intensity, rots the mind with dire morbidity & leaves you ravenous for more.
db,
you were dearly missed.
jsw
PS: anyone got "God Bless the Girl" for me? PM for trade.
Active Member
It's his only work since Reality...
Hairy Member
That was the, uh...you know, the joke. ;-)
It is apparently standard procedure for every db album for reviewers to say "best since Scary Monsters". Alas his 90s and 00s output tend to be overlooked.
Last edited by uroboros; 03-09-2013 at 01:37 PM.
Member
I finally heard the album just over an hour ago. It's really fucking good. It seems like a mish-mash of basically many of the great periods that Bowie has been through in his career. There's a bit of glam. There's a bit of soul. There's a bit of 90s stuff. There's a bit of electro stuff. It's really solid. I don't want to compare it to every other album. That's too tiresome. Plus, "best since Scary Monsters" is just too cliche these days.
The Virus Inside
I've listened to this album a coutless number of times this week, and it keeps getting better. However, i still cannot get into "Where Are We now?" AT ALL! As soon as it comes on, I skip it. I try and give it a chance each time, but it just drones on. Like I said earlier, it disrupts an otherwise perfect flow of the album.
Other than that, i give this album an 8/10.
Bite me
Review of The Next Day in today's Chicago Sun-Times. (3 1/2 out of 4 stars, 4 being "essential")
Throughout the ’90s, David Bowie ran from his past. He swore off his catalog in concert, couched himself in a middling rock band (Tin Machine) and embraced emerging electronica music — even touring with Nine Inch Nails, looking frightfully the follower rather than the usual leader.
The results ranged from OK (“Earthling,” 1997) to oh-dear (“Hours…,” 1999). Then, recognizing that he had built for himself a wheelhouse containing many mansions, he did the smart thing at the turn of this century and went back inside. “Heathen” (2002) and “Reality” (2003) are two of Bowie’s most accessible and enjoyable records, not only because of their renewed songwriting focus and alluring tunes but because he made them with Tony Visconti, the trusted producer-pal who helmed most of Bowie’s landmark albums in the 1970s. Together they drew inspiration from Bowie’s past without retreading it. “Heathen” rang a lot of familiar Bowie bells, and “Reality” started to fashion something like a new sound — a sound that “The Next Day” capitalizes, underlines and emboldens.
“The Next Day” is titled for the future, yet its face is a defacement of the past, papering the new title over the cover of Bowie’s landmark “Heroes” (1977). The first “New” single is the maudlin “Where Are We Now?,” a sighing reminiscence of Bowie’s days in Berlin (recording some of those early albums with Visconti). That song materialized in January on Bowie’s 66th birthday. Not a peppy comeback, by any means, it was embraced overenthusiastically by fans just glad to know he was not only alive but writing.
Bowie’s last tour, in 2004, was interrupted by an emergency angioplasty to clear a blocked artery. Dire rumors of his health have circulated since, and the Flaming Lips recorded a song called “Is David Bowie Dying?” The title track here, though, finds Bowie sneering, “‘I’m gonna say goodbye,’ he says/Yeah,” as in, yeah, right.
This new day, however, is a cloudy one. “The Next Day” is not an easy album to digest. Lyrics span a variety of Bowie fixations — dystopian futures, gangs of cross-dressing boys and, of course, fame cursed fame. While this is definitely a rock record, the music careens through several styles and affectations, from “Reality” rewrites (“The Stars [Are Out Tonight]”) and good ol’ glam-rock (“Valentine’s Day”) to the jazzy chase-scene arrangement of “If You Can See Me” and the wonderfully lurching, Morphine-like rhythm and sax of “Dirty Boys.”
Instead of playing nearly everything themselves, as they did on the intimate “Heathen” and “Reality” records, Bowie and Visconti brought a band back to the studio — a legion of Bowie pals (including guitarist Earl Slick, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, “Serious Moonlight”-era sax player Steve Elson) — the more the merrier to muddle the memories. The album thus plays like a band working on new tunes but relying on muscle memory, not resting on laurels but on the assurance of one of rock’s richest catalogs.
Bowie obsessives will find plenty here for forensic analysis, musically and lyrically, but ultimately “The Next Day” stands on its own, or at least as the culmination of what “Heathen” and “Reality” were trying out. Finally comfortable with his own legacy, Bowie has made a record that feels like classic Bowie. Of course, we tend to say that about every new Bowie album. But “The Next Day” likely is the first album in at least 20 years that finally deserves this oft-repeated claim: “It’s the best Bowie since ‘Scary Monsters’!”
Last edited by allegro; 03-13-2013 at 04:06 PM.
Hairy Member
I'm really sorry for my constant linking over here on ETS, but nowadays, I just tend to write articles and pieces about things I'm obsessing over, and this is just another case of that.
I wrote a piece on Bowie's endless transformations throughout the decades, and I think I'm really proud of it, and you guys may enjoy it. So here's the link to that.
Now, I must review this strange and perplexing album. I think Bowie is laughing at every critic that's trying to unfurl it.
Bite me
Review in today's USA Today:
Too often, a rock veteran's new work elicits a hopeful audit followed by a happy retreat to the fusty greatest-hits compilation.
Not so with David Bowie, whose golden years are overshadowing his golden oldies.
The glitter rock, plastic soul and electronica albums of the '70s stand among Bowie's tallest achievements, and the elegance, urgency and versatility of his 2013 return provide powerful proof that pop music's craftiest chameleon has lost none of his sound vision.
The Next Day (* * * * out of four) arrives Tuesday, ending years of rumors that Bowie was retired or ill. (In 2011, the Flaming Lips and Neon Indian released the single Is David Bowie Dying?)
It's Bowie's first studio album since 2003's Reality and his best since 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Secretly writing and recording for two years with longtime producer Tony Visconti, Bowie crafted an emotionally dramatic, stylistically diverse, sonically bold and lyrically complex song cycle tackling a chaotic, war-scarred, celebrity-driven world of bewildered souls.
The disc's title and cover, with the 1977 Heroes album photo papered over, clearly telegraphs Bowie's determination to look forward, and he's succeeded in sculpting a bracingly modern collection. Some tunes fly off into experimental realms that would leave listeners disoriented if not for the solid melodies and Bowie's emotionally rich vocals.
Yet his past echoes in the grooves of Next, whether it's a sprinkling of Ziggy Stardust in the title track, a chunk of Hunky Dory in If You Can See Me or smidges of Lodger dirges in You Feel So Lonely You Could Die. Nothing feels like a throwback, however.
Single Where Are We Now?, the delicate, nostalgic ballad released Jan. 8, on Bowie's 66th birthday, hinted at an introspective, autobiographical bent. Instead, Next leans toward observation (the pained ruminations of battle-weary soldiers in I'd Rather Be High and How Does the Grass Grow?) and uptempo bold strokes (The Next Day and the soulful, psychedelic Dancing Out in Space). The album peaks with the sax-driven, sensual Dirty Boys; bleakly beautiful Valentine's Day; and The Stars (Are Out Tonight), a feverish rocker mocking celebrity culture.
The Next Day marks a glorious homecoming. Here's hoping we don't have to wait another decade for Day After Next.
Last edited by allegro; 03-11-2013 at 11:16 PM.
Member
USA Today does put a review worth reading every once in a while. This was definitely one of their finer moments. Pitchfork's review was actually pretty good. Allmusic's as usual was lame as Stephen Erlwine is a terrible critic. PopMatters' review sucks ass.
Bite me
Review in The Atlantic:
Hearing an album for the first time is an experience of incremental revelation, note by note. But repeated listens can smooth over the surprising moments of that initial encounter, and it's easy to forget what was once the exciting foreignness of a work. The snags in the fabric of David Bowie's best art, though, do not disappear over time; they become more fascinating. The Next Day, his first new album in 10 years, is a powerful reminder of just how deftly David Bowie crafts the strange and the profane. Dissonance becomes its own form of harmony, and ugliness beauty.
The Next Day, his 24th studio album, is a robust encore for Bowie, whose sudden return to the music world has had the dramatic proportions of a messianic resurrection. Following the 2003 release of Reality, Bowie suffered a heart attack and gradually withdrew from public view. Most thought he had retired from his half-century-long career for good. But the creative itch seems to have returned, and Bowie began secret recording sessions for The Next Day about two years ago ("He just said, 'I feel like writing again,'" recalled Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer, in a Rolling Stone interview). On his 66th birthday this past January, Bowie's website announced the forthcoming release of The Next Day and posted the video for its lead single, "Where Are We Now?" The viewer is treated to a brief glimpse of the musician as he gazes imposingly upon what looks like an artist's studio, filled with the clutter of creativity. What has he built for us?
The dreamy and ruminative "Where Are We Now?" is unlike the album's predominant style: rock charged with a chest-beating aggression that sometimes tamps down into a rusty, gravelly cool. While the album, as is typical of Bowie, avoids confessionalism and fashions personalities other than himself—a soldier tired of war, a medieval man whipped through the streets (reportedly based on Bowie's perusal of English history books)—the artist feels more present than ever. Bowie makes a bold swipe in the urgent, first track, where his leathery voice—despite having lost some of its whiplash agility with age—breaks out into high-pitched shouts or curls into vicious growls. "Listen!" he demands, like a stern schoolteacher.
Bowie has addressed aging before, on his previous records, but The Next Day summons death with a newfound directness. The imagery is visceral ("How does the grass grow? / Blood blood blood / Where do the boys lie? / Mud mud mud"), the language stark ("I can see you as a corpse / Hanging from a beam"), and the threats unrestrained ("I will slaughter your kind"). But age still hasn't equipped him to answer questions that would have been at home in a 19th-century Russian novel: "Where are we now?" he muses, and in the smoky closing track, "I tell myself / I don't know who I am." But stars, that perennial theme in Bowie's work (and in his most famous incarnation, the alien rocker Ziggy Stardust), hover over the dark lyrical landscape. They offer escape and mystery. The artist who turns his gaze skyward sees possibilities that are not so earthbound and so weighted by death. "I gaze in defeat / At the stars in the night," he sings, "The light in my life burnt away / There will be no tomorrow." The man who fell to earth aches to return.
But there is another escape valve: art. The formal risks taken by The Next Day fall in line with Bowie's long history of reinvention and provocation. The album is full of moments in which the next millisecond is nearly impossible to predict, leaving the listener helpless to the vagaries of the music. These precise moments can be difficult to recall from memory; their peculiarity seems to guard the music against disposability. The album's remarkable centerpiece, "If You Can See Me," trips over itself in its frenetic headlong race; it is a struggle to keep up. The key of "Dancing Out in Space" repeatedly modulates with no pivot chord, like an on-off switch flicked up and down, and the song ends in a key different from what it began with. The introductory passage of "How Does the Grass Grow?" sets up the rest of the song in no recognizable way, and a later section sounds as though it has been lifted from a different song and stitched in with surgical care. Even the burst of guitar that kicks off the album can sound like a mistake.
The abrupt announcement of the album after a decade-long silence has the effect of focusing attention on Bowie's legacy (responses in the media have tended toward retrospection), while at the same time providing a point of departure from this same legacy (The Next Day will always be "that" album, the gateway to a new era, and not just part of a series). Bowie openly plays with this balance. The music videos for "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" and "Where Are We Now?" pay homage, respectively, to his coke-addled Thin White Duke persona and to his fabled years of creative ferment in Berlin. But this is not straightforward nostalgia. In the first video, Bowie and Tilda Swinton (another famously androgynous artist) play an elderly couple, the one wearing a pert yellow cardigan and the other doing indoor aerobic exercises. "We have a nice life," they murmur in the grocery store. Later, Bowie bangs his fists against the wall to ask the younger version of himself—sexual, reckless, creative—to please quiet down so that he and his wife can watch TV. Has age dampened rebellion? Does maturity weaken creativity?
Bowie seems to stiff-arm these doubts with the cover art for The Next Day. The designer, Jonathan Barnbrook, vandalizes the cover of his 1977 album Heroes, one of the most sacred images in the Bowie archive: It shows the 30-year-old artist as saint, hand lifted in vague worship and eyes fixed in transcendental thought. The Next Day superimposes a white square and its name, in generic font, onto the original image and crosses out the album title. It looks like a joke, and it is objectively ugly, all the more because it is offensively bland—anti-Bowie, in another context. But here, the self-awareness cuts through the banality.
Bowie is not precious about his past. His legacy is not invulnerable to the subversive manipulations of his art. He will violate, even destroy, his past incarnations in pursuit of a way forward. It's a sign of his faith in creative renewal. The costume changes, the personas, and the musical transformations over Bowie's long career are less interesting than the philosophy that has underpinned them. His irreverence comes from a place of reverence—for music, for mystery, for one's inner life, that unknowable territory that can only be mapped with the inexact brushstrokes of art. Like us, Bowie is of the world where clocks tick and the body grows sicker, but his art has made it possible for him to lay claim to "the next day, and the next, and another day."
Last edited by allegro; 03-12-2013 at 09:32 AM.
Active Member
I just bought the album today (consciously stayed away from itunes, because I wanted the physical copy and the experience of getting it on release date, the excitement, etc.)
Wow. Just wow.
This is fantastic. I'm blown away, I even like the previously hated cover, looking at the whole package it really works.
Throbbing Member
While some things really bug me about this album (the fact songs mostly fade out rather than finish), this is really good. Throws Reality aside, and I think it works better as a whole than Heathen. Bowie sounds great, the rockier tracks sound like a band having fun and taking pleasure in recording, rather than treating it as a job, a trap many older artists seem to fall into. My only other complaint is with the bonus tracks its pretty long. So yeah. its a good album.
Hairy Member
Here's my Antiquiet review of The Next Day by the way.
Plastered over city streets are photos of a black-and white David Bowie summoning Erich Heckel’s Roquairol. It is a familiar photograph – almost: One palm faces Bowie as another rests on his heart, as Berlin memories resurface and as three of Bowie’s most seminal works begin to echo in our minds with fervent nostalgia. But there is a minor blemish to this reminiscence: Bowie’s face is indistinguishable. Those vacant, mechanical and faraway eyes are now covered by a white square, defaced; and the simple ironical word – “Heroes” – is crossed out without a replacement. Instead, on the surface of that strange rectangle reads “The Next Day.”
Nothing else is said, not even alluded to. Does it mean that Bowie is invoking his past or straying away from it? Perhaps it means nothing at all?
There is no sense of newness in The Next Day, no novel glimpse of the David Bowie that has risen from the ashes of his ten-year reclusion. But this lack of explicit originality is a not shortcoming. It is, actually, quite deliberate.
Bowie’s decade-long absence from the popular world has given him enough time to craft a persona entirely unintelligible in the blaring, ear-splitting world of short-attention-spanned celebrity. By simply rustling or evoking well-established themes and processes, Bowie has cast himself as a phantom in popular culture, a celebrity wrapped in silhouette, simply observing those interpreting him, talking about him, and pondering over him, without adding his own rejoinder. His legend is being furthered by his name and his veneers and his previous works simply echoing in the atmosphere all over again.
It is extraordinary how in this freakish, celebrity-obsessed world, it is Bowie’s silence that has recast the spotlight upon him. But the artist himself is not to be seen. All that one can come across under that gleaming light is the string of works already left behind by him: traces of Ziggy Stardust, some almost familiar sights of Berlin, and mere whispers from the Bowie of the new – crooning from behind a curtain, drenched in muffled mystique, refusing to reveal himself, and disinclined to add to the conversation.
This is how his legend will carry on: by the words of others.
Let others guess what new face snivels behind his iron mask, and let them mull over its impenetrable themes, and let them craft the artist they choose to craft based on the sole item they’ve been given – with its nostalgic yet defaced exterior and the scatter-brained multifariousness that ruthlessly careens inside of it.
Bowie wants no part in it. He is merely the artist, merely the name plastered onto the product. His legend is no longer dictated by his choice of words and characters, as it wasn’t when he tried to be in control of them, and just as it wasn’t when his legend swelled and intensified when he decided to quietly step into the shadows.
And The Next Day begins without any such stillness. Bowie bellows that he is still alive, not quite dead, and he laughs off the lamentations over his sudden withdrawal, and commandingly sways his song forward. Suddenly, the ferocity of the title-track gives way to delicious sleaze as Bowie playfully shuffles through with Dirty Boys. And at the onset it becomes quite clear that The Next Day’s exterior isn’t at all about narrative or intelligibility. Instead, it is a web of truth and of invention, of honesty and deception, and of parables and candor. It is impossible to say which is which, and that is perhaps the magic of the record: it is not an easy listen. It confuses its audience just as it delights them, and one can choose what one wants from it. It could be for mere amusement or it could serve as something deeper, difficult, and more artful. It is both, as the artist masks his self and his intentions with allusions and with allegories, brutishly denying his audience even a moment of vicariousness, while concurrently feeding them with superficial puree. The downright distress ofYou Feel So Lonely You Could Die could easily be contradicted by its somewhat jovial exterior, while the prophetic Heat could be taken as truth or shrugged off as another fallacy.
It is also clear that somewhere beneath the stories that The Next Day tells, Bowie, too, is speaking. It is simply a matter of finding out which is which, and who is who, and simply involving oneself with Bowie’s now-meta mystique.
It is mystifying that a record could so heartlessly bemuse and perplex and bedazzle while at the same time delight and amuse in such a simple-hearted way. No wonder that Bowie alludes to Vladimir Nabokov in I’d Rather Be High. Nabokov was the master of cruel high-art. He played his readers without ever making them aware of their imprudence or his own unkindness. Bowie seems to be following in the author’s footsteps, unyielding in his cunning, and so skillful at controlling his congregation. He directly admits to his fraudulence in Heat, continually iterating that he is a dissembler, that he is a fraud, that he is a seer, as The Next Day comes to a close, but his listeners are so much in his control by then, that nobody could possibly believe him.
Not a moment of The Next Day is uncalculated, and not a second passes by without a missed reference or a neglected allusion to a past work, or a previous character, or to Bowie himself. It is impossible to tire from a record that pleases its audience so superficially with its sophisticated splendor, while also denying them the right to any trace of lucidity. It is as cruel as Nabokov was cruel, and it is doubtlessly Bowie’s most unsympathetic work, but The Next Day isn’t simply harsh for the sake of cruelty. It is challenging, as popular art hasn’t been in a very long time. It is invigorating how the record refuses to give in or to reveal itself in however many listens, and perhaps, it never will.
The Next Day is a parable fabricated by an even-more-powerful one – its artist, who still dawdles in the shadows and sneers at the labyrinth he’s crafted and the lies he’s told. But liars tell the prettiest of stories, even when they hide their faces and even when they seal their mouths in quietude.
Stubby Member
Here's Bowie's wife telling he will tour again:http://www.contactmusic.com/news/dav...o-tour_3552267
and here am i hoping for a Bowie/NIN tour ....!!!
Art Damaged
Nod to "Low".
Bite me
ALL music reviews have pretty much sucked for decades; all the flowery verbose smoke blowing out of writers' asses, gag. Quote Elvis Costello: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." I really don't get the song-by-song descriptions as if the writers are providing a service to deaf people, or really stupid people.
Time Magazine review:
When The Next Day was announced, speculation ran rampant. The first single, “Where Are We Now?”, presented David Bowie musing on the Berlin he inhabited almost 40 years ago. The radical album art defaces the centerpiece of his “Berlin Trilogy,” “Heroes.” Tony Visconti, his frequent collaborator who produced that period, was back. It was all quite transparent: after 10 years between albums, Bowie hasn’t returned to shelve out some catchy art rock, he’s come back to make a statement.
You can chalk “what is that statement?” up on the list of puzzles to solve. The Next Day is a dense and varied body of work that Bowie has all but outright challenged fans to cross examine. Invoking the “Berlin Trilogy” suggests that The Next Day might be more than meets the eye conceptually, and at the very least, should serve as a red flag that listeners’ wits should be about them. None of the record’s 14 tracks are casual affairs, and only few of them are catchy enough to overcome a passive listen. The latest single, “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” is as easy as Bowie will go on listeners without a greater investment of time, and that track still offers a multi-layered experience.
It’s been suggested that the title, The Next Day, could refer to the track “Heroes.” If “we could be heroes, just for one day,” then this would be the day afterward. However, the title track is another thing entirely. Inspired by a recent interest in medieval history, Bowie writes a thrashing rock song of priestly conspiracies, angry mobs, and a heathen “not quite dead… body left to rot in a hollow tree.” Instead, it’s the somber first single, “Where Are We Now?”, that serves as the only strict tie to “Heroes.” “Had to get the train from Potzdamer Platz,” sings Bowie, mentioning a key landmark where the Berlin Wall formerly divided the city. The song could be not only Bowie’s emotional revisiting of a landscape that’s changed so much, but a return to that bold young couple “standing by the wall” in 1977.
Bowie’s nods to his back catalog don’t start and stop with Berlin. The album’s penultimate track “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” could be an important part of the Bowie mythos, waiting to be torn apart by fans: a classically styled rock ballad that ends unmistakably with the opening drums of “Five Years” from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. This is more than a head-nod to some of his most famous work – the song itself is a likely suspect as a follow-up, or perhaps prelude to that story. The lyrics easily fit into Ziggy‘s future world of indifferent, over-indulged youths, five years before humanity’s end.
Analyzing the rest of the record as sequels to previous albums gets sketchy after that. Keep listening for tag-backs and more faint similarities to show up, but much of it could be projection. If the unifying theme of The Next Day is Bowie revisiting albums, perhaps for most of the tracks, the revisiting is conceptual rather than narrative. There’s no definite answer in reach, but an integral part of enjoying this record is asking these questions.
Bowie’s prior album, 2003′s Reality, was a quintessential rock record for the Thin White Duke. It was accessible, delivered a couple great covers, and generally had something for everyone. As a whole, The Next Day is the opposite experience. It’s a challenging album, and not just because its tracks are a puzzle box — the mix is dense. Perhaps more than any of Bowie’s prior 23 records, this one is an art record. Not “art” in how affecting it is, or even how complex it is by design, but in that it’s made to be carefully considered, deconstructed, and debated. On a track-by-track basis, the album becomes less obtuse. Though bound by the dense mix, the tracks of The Next Day stand alone.
“Dirty Boys” sounds like it could’ve taken a page from a Tom Waits LP – a circus dirge with dirty sax and a smooth chorus. “Love is Lost” is an organ-heavy rock grind on the subject of grim cosmetic transformation and social dysphoria. “If You Can See Me” has one of the most abrasive sounds on the record; it’s a drum and bass-heavy track that would sit snug somewhere between 1993′s Black Tie White Noise and 1995′s Outside. In fact, the delightful, disjointed, and impenetrable lyrics could find a home with the latter album, or one of its long-discussed sequels. The final track, “Heat,” invites the most questions with its desolate, desert-like yawn and lush details that tease a mysterious narrative.
In three tracks, Bowie surprises with sociopolitical stories more befitting his quasi-folk rocker days than anything he’s written in the past 30 years. “Valentine’s Day” is a tragic ballad, almost a love song, to a high school shooter. “I’d Rather Be High” chronicles a modern soldier’s bitter return to society after “training these guns on the men in the sand.” And “How Does the Grass Grow?” is another wartime track with a chorus taken right out of a chant used in bayonet training.
Coming to terms with The Next Day has been an ordeal and a struggle of initial indifference. One has to dig deep and fight uphill to connect here, but that climb results in a rewarding, fascinating listen. Yet what’s more intriguing is speculating on what The Next Day could become and whether or not any of its mysteries will be solved. As always, Bowie remains in constant metamorphosis and here we are once again with a litter of erratic questions. Though, the mere fact that we’re spinning around in speculation only champions this as a success.
Last edited by allegro; 03-13-2013 at 04:10 PM.
desperately chilled
fun fact for outside fans: just found out via the always excellent pushing ahead of the dame blog that the title track was actually a reworking of a live-only tin machine outtake, maintaining much of the same chord progression/vibe/lyrics and removing all the tough-guy, crass macho bullshit that was prevalent in tin machine. just kind of cool to know that a great latter-day bowie track stems from one of the lowest points in his career (though i like 'i can't read' and 'you belong in rock n'roll' just fine).
Active Member
I'm struggling to find the source for it right now (might be one of my many bowie books at home) but his approach on songs fading out is that he actually prefers it because, paraphrased, things in life rarely "end," they just sort of fade away and then the next thing starts up. As someone who used to hate songs fading out, that attitude totally gave me an appreciation for them.
Throbbing Member
To me it sounds like a hangover from when records had to be shorter... Plus I like songs to finish, not just bowie but other artists too. The only thing worse is a fade in. Remember this is entirely me being strange!
I blasted the record in the car earlier today.. The first six or so songs range from okey to great.. but after then it really takes off, I love (You Will) Set the World on Fire and as if to undermine myself, How Does The Grass Grow (even with its fade out)
bastard from blue city
that's not strange at all. in fact, it's quite intelligent. fadeouts will always be indicative of a writing copout or a gimmick; the very few examples of well-done fading (occasional Pink Floyd uses, for instance) tend to be in pieces that were avant garde to begin with. repeating a chorus into infinity and fading it out will never, ever be anything but a copout. if Bowie likes his songs to be more like real life, perhaps they should end suddenly, or get messy and explode.
Bite me
Up until relatively recently, the fadeout was pretty common. The Beatles used it a lot, too. As someone mentioned, it was great for radio. Not for length, but because it was easy for DJs to cut the song wherever they wanted. (The end of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" is a good example; some DJs insisted on letting the ENTIRE fade play, while others cut it short). Ditto for "Hey, Jude." It was just common practice back then. A definite END to a song just seemed too Broadway or something.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2...out-at-the-end
I'm so used to fades that I didn't even NOTICE them on this Bowie album, he's used them SO much. Even before Low.
Last edited by allegro; 03-14-2013 at 10:38 PM.
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