The Thin White Puke
Whatever he is, he isn't human. David Bowie, as much as I like listening to him (and I really, really do, almost as much as my beloved Stones and Grateful Dead, in fact) there's a plasticene quality to the man and his career that seems a little odd, a little inhuman, and a whole lot like sometime ol' Dave Jones is just going to up and tear his latex facemask off and show the world, to great shock and much gnashing of mandibular teeth, that he's actually Neil Diamond, in the fucking flesh!
No, no, hear me out...Neil always really wanted to be a rocker, what with his leather catsuit stage outfits and his 'Kentucky Woman' and horrific yet skillful feats of cannibalistic violence against stagehands, and the David Bowie persona was just his chance to prove to everyone that he's actually not a short, slightly pudgy Jewish schlock-crooner with a penchant for big horns and making otherwise perfectly calm middle-aged spinster librarians rip off their size 24X cotton bloomer panties and launch them at the stage, but is actually a sexually ambiguous, theatrical avante-garde-type rock 'n' roller with a penchant for short, bald keyboard players and burnt-out Sixties punk idols. But since Neil isn't, you know, all that inventive, he's had to steal most of his best ideas from others...he ripped the whole 'space cadet' down-home hippie idealist acousto-rocker from Donovan and Syd Barrett, the ambiguously metallic Alien/Demon Gay Rapist from Alice Cooper (and Iggy Pop, and ? and the Mysterians, and Mick Jagger, and Marc Bolan, and the 13th Floor Elevators...), the Fascist Uber-European Cannon from Bryan Ferry and Peter Hammill, and the modern Industro-Klanger from, oh I dunno, John Tesh and his Pierced Labia Orchestra, or sumbuddy. See, but at heart, Neil was a schlockmeister, a popularizer, and though he tried with varying success to repress his cheesier impulses, his David Bowie came bubbling over with pop hooks that had served ol' Diamond so well back when he was writing TV hits for the Monkees (who, now that I think about it, also had a 'David Jones' involved. Now, I hope I'm not alone on this, but it doesn't take a Stephen "Fucking Badass" Hawking and his Amazing Goddamn Talking Chair to connect the dots with a straight line on this one!), and garnered some unwanted attention when he scored a hit with 'Space Oddity', for which he simply wasn't ready. Sheeit, he hadn't even begun dying his hair orange yet! And that goddamn Dick Cavett kept asking him to come on as Neil Diamond over and over again to sing 'Sweet Caroline' for the zillionth fucking time. As if trying to remember the words to 'The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud' when he got back to England wasn't hard enough already!
Now this kind of success didn't come overnight...Neil actually formulated ol' Dave back in the mid-60's, back when he himself was a star on the rise. He wisely made ol' Dave a snazzily-dressed Brit, to help defray suspicions of his true identity (plus, faking Brit accents is easy. Just ask Madonna.), and spent years tirelessly studying a high-yet-guttural London accent, then applying a bit of acting-school polish to it so it sounds both snooty and mad as a lead boxer-short salesman, leaving behind the trademark Diamond baritone grit for a tenor sheen, but keeping all of that overdramatic vomit-froth that made so many girls in beehive haircuts couldn't get enough of. The results of this transformation can be heard on 'David Jones' many mid-60's folk-rock singles right on up through his late-60's breakthough debut, after which Diamond realized it was wiser to record with a band, both further defraying interest in why all of his solo works sound like 'Cherry Cherry' without the go-go beat, and because, well, he likes how everyone claimed David wanted to be Anthony Newley for five years instead of pointing the finger at the source.
It wasn't long until the act took on a life of its own, though...as the 70's wore on and the rock-doppleganger experiment continued its success, Diamond became Bowie became Ziggy the Chubby Round Loser Cartoon Character became, well, a whole bunch of other crap that kept the money rolling in while Diamond's own career was rusting in its own sweat and chest hair. Diamond collaborated with Iggy Pop (actually Englebert Humperdink in a cheap Halloween mask he bought at a drugstore in 1967 for $1.99), Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople (Lobo) and Lou Reed (who is, inexplicably, actually Lou Reed). He also began to lose a sense as to who...or what...he actually was. He began to fantasize that he was actually a white black man who was sent to preach the gospel on Soul Train and, in a particularly wicked turn of events, convince old rival John Lennon, completely unawares of Bowie's true identity, that no one wanted to hear his bullshit solo career anymore and that he should just go home and try to finish the New York Times Crossword each and every day. Things in Neil Diamond's world had gotten scary...he embodied birds on Jonathan Livingston Seagull, embodied a gay man who actually wasn't in David Bowie, and played a straight man who was actually gayer than a feather boa in Neil Diamond. For a while in the late 70's, Neil disappeared altogether and 'Bowie' moved to Germany, where many rumors had it that Diamond actually became a Kraftwerk stunt double and keyboard-sweat-wiper for 18 months. Things came to an explosive head around 1980, when Diamond was so whacked out on gorilla tranquilizers that he actually thought he was Debbie Harry in the video to David's 'Fashion'. Neil took a few years off to work on his tan and come back reformed, once again, this time as a more sensitive and less fashion-conscious David, who, finally, has forged a remarkably consistent and artistically rewarding career since that point.
ricco
Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: cant believe some of the sh*t ive heard here like to see
you do any better at a song career if you wrote different material every single
time you would have nothing else later and run out of ideas faster
(Capn's
Response: I can guarantee I'd use more punctuation and write complete
thoughts, Ricco. And I sure as fuck wouldn't half-a**edly apologize for my use
of words like 'shit', either.)
High-laryus Mod I-don't-have-a-fucking-clue-what-to-do-with-a-guitar-and-a-microphone kidstuff singles collection from one David Jones, Londoner and certifiable Mod, not to mention one shameless Mick Jagger/Eric Burdon/Roger Daltrey/Keith Relf wannabe. This one gathers together all of ol' Davey's A and B sides from his innumerable mid-Sixties bands, leaving only one question - how the hell did this guy keep coming up with the dough to record failed single after failed single? These cost a shitload of green to keep coming out at a rate of 3 or so a year, especially when they drop like Apache helicopters once they hit the market. Not one of these songs would be even remotely familiar to anyone who knows the rest of Bowie's catalogue (no, 'The Laughing Gnome', that novelty stalwart of Dr. Demento's late-night fat-kid-with-zits-and-braces-loved radio show, isn't here either), though he's listed as a writer on darn near all of the songs. Bowie just isn't Bowie yet (right, because he's Jones, you dipshits!) and he's too busy honing his Xeroxing skills that would come to such good use in his later years to define himself as anything other than Just Another British Blues Rock Singer. Sure, one with teeth so crooked they remind one of the Dresden skyline after the firebombing raids, and one that politely honks a saxophone from time to time, but who's keeping score here? These songs are mostly half-efforts at pop-chart success in the vein of whomever was big at the time, from the Beatles ('I Want My Baby Back', which does have some genuinely nice overdubbed vocal harmonies) to Donovan ('Bars of the County Jail') to the Rolling Stones ('I Pity The Fool', to which Mr. T would call Bowie a 'sucka'), and on into the Who and Kinks (the laughably derivative 'You've Got A Habit Of Leaving Me' and 'Baby Loves It That Way', respectively), some of which was actually produced by the Kink-manager Shel Talmy, who no doubt thought David was a nice piece of ass compared to nasty ol' buck-toothed Ray Davies. Anyway, pretty much all these songs suck it in one way or another - the vocal inflections are often put-on to more closely resemble their 'supposed-to-be's, the songs are repetitive, simplistically arranged, badly recorded (or mastered for CD directly from some scratchy old 45 rpm records, which is sorta like taking a photograph of an Etch-a-Sketch drawing in a snowstorm in terms of realistically portraying what it originally sounded like), and just generally of low quality. Sometimes our boy pops a freak base hit (the monstrous guitar feedback orgy in 'You've Got A Habit of Leaving'), but most of these 17 songs are simply not very good. A small hint of the Bowie we all know and are creeped out by makes an appearance on 'Can Help Thinking 'Bout Me', also one of the only tracks where Bowie's voice is completely recognizable, but that's not signaling anything particularly revolutionary - the album limps to the end with five more jive-turkey swingin'-Mod failures.
Listening to this man's ever-so-gory pubescent growing pains blow-by-blow is definitely interesting for fans...once. But the truth is that Bowie mad his career on knocking off other people's ideas well, and when you hear him fail over and over and over to come up with a song that even sounds somewhat convincing, it's not hard to begin wondering just what kind of fucking poseur this fool is. You have to give him credit for writing original material when so many other people were still covering the Vast and Vaired Works of Chuck Berry, and recognize that he was out there surrounded by bands populated by no-talent-never-will-be's instead of good Sixties 'proving ground' band like the Graham Bond Organisation or John Mayall's Bluesbreakers to help him hone his skills, and hell, not everyone's warts-and-all training-wheels days are archived by Rhino quite like this, but still...three years of trying and not one winner. Simply nothing that tells you this is anything but a guy with a smidge of talent and a massive set of brass balls for copying other people's sounds. Hell, it'd be 1970 before people gave a crap at all! Where did all this bread come from, anyway? Mimes just don't make that much money!
Capn's Final Word: David learned to 'reinvent' himself here...that's the only way recording studio people kept letting him make shitty singles over and over. I bet he wore disguises, too.
Jesus, this guy bought into the whole 1967 Swingin' Pot Smokin' Paisley-Wearin' Mod-Hippie Faggot Mime Fashion Maven fad with both checkbooks and a wallet of cash, didn't he? Probably was considered a 'face' at the time due to his impeccable fashion sense, and was invited to all the parties and lusted after by all the homosexual middle-aged English men in suits that always flocked around this idiotic scene. And his sexual, ummm, 'agreeability' was probably the main reason they granted him yet another opportunity to break into pop music stardom after chucking his last half-dozen tries straight into the crapper. His debut album (or is it? Is this really another singles collection? God, who knows with this fucking Decca company) is another chance not simply missed, but spat upon, chewed up, passed through the lower intestine, tossed in a blender, pureed into a milkshake, fed to a dyspeptic hog, and thrown at the face of Good Taste. David's album is frighteningly Early 1967 in both sound and intent, part of one of the least artistically resilient periods in rock history, that of the hash-influenced pre-Pepper's British 'dancehall' craze kicked off by the Beatles' Penny Lane' and represented at its best by the Kinks' Something Else and the Stones' Flowers and Between the Buttons albums. But wait....those names I just mentioned? Forget I ever said 'em. They have nothing to do with this phlegm-puddle other than a shared accent and maybe a record label. Bowie may have tried his best to make an LP that would stack up to those near-classics (which, I might add, aren't those band's best work by any stretch of the labia), but instead he made an embarrassing chunk of dated horse-pucky that says more about the man's ability to huckster an image than it does about his ability to make music. The David Bowie album is loaded with march tempos, unironic, unswinging horn charts, infantile baby-la-la-nursery school fairy-tale lyrics, and a fierce case of meaningless lyrical diarrhea that makes Jon Anderson look like Henry Rollins. The song titles should tip you off that this is not just another blues-rock album waiting for a guitar solo - 'Little Bombardier', 'There Is A Happy Land', 'Come and Buy My Toys', 'Sell Me A Coat' - sweet giggling Ginsbergs, is this what Bob Dylan labored for five long years for? For some coattailing British fop to write lines like 'Jack Frost took her hand and left me, Jack Frost ain't so cool'? Gawd. And all of these songs are the same! The same, you hear me! It's not even weird (it's early 1967, not late 1967)! It's just, just SICKENING!
Okay, now some clarifications. This is not a rock and roll record. It's a psychedelic dancehall record, full of carnival noises so British they'll and there's absolutely nothing resembling the relatively listenable Early Years material here, and hell, even the 'immature' Space Oddity sounds like Astral Weeks in comparison. Anyway, it's not just that I'm knocking this record because I hate the style (which I essentially do...for me, listening to this hipster bullshit is akin to drinking battery acid out of a Dirty Dancing commemorative cup), it's also the man's most incompetent album ever. Bowie's voice is the worst I've heard it up to his darkest mid-80's days, pitchier than Roger Clemens and twice as likely to clobber a 'climax' high note. And he sings in this put-on cock-nay accent like he's got Big Ben stuck halfway up his ass, making it all the more enjoyable for yours truly. Tempos are sacrificed at the altar of croon, and the backing tracks are an incoherent swill of soupy orchestras and clanging pianos. There isn't an electric guitar or audible rhythm section in earshot, all underpinning my original statement: This. Is Not. A Rock. And. Roll. Album. Not in intent, attitude, composition, delivery, or production. That's all well and good. I like albums that aren't rock albums. Country, for instance! A selection of jazz! Gospel music, even. But this is just indescribable. The fact that Bowie was still able to keep getting opportunities to record more songs after this album fell off the face of the planet shows the man knew how to wear a suit, if not how to sing a song.
Capn's Final Word: A pretty face can only get you so far. Music to smoke polyester to.
Space Oddity
- RCA 1969
Bowie had his blues hipster phase, his mod hipster phase, and his pansy dancehall hipster phase, and now he's gone into his counterculture hipster phase, strangely his most palatable yet. Oddity (actually the US title upon this record's eventual release in 1972, which was the same as the British Man of Whores Man of Crabs album released in 1969, though the 'Space Oddity' single was first recorded in 1968, which in turn was knocked off of a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd performance circa 1967) presents Bowie as the kind of guy you might see hanging out at the park on a Saturday afternoon, his ever-so-cool Beaker haircut marking him as a Deep Thinker and conspicuous acoustic guitar marking him as a Guy Out To Score With Hippie Chicks. You know, the sort of dude who probably ate trays of hash brownies daily and threw the I Ching before leaving the house to check the mail. He's a fraud, really (hell, Bowie was always kind of a fraud, but at this time he still hadn't learned how to fake it good yet), but compared with the fashion-maven slimeball featured on the David Bowie album, he's a fraud that I don't mind too bad. Bowie's cast himself as a sort of acoustic space cadet, a folksy psychadelicist who tries to hard for weird chords and lets-scream-this-all-together humanist anthems. His songs here range from subtle, spacey anthems ('Space Oddity', the cute 'tell my wife I love her very much...I think my spaceship knows which way to go' NASA fantasy which Bowie would later famously say was about becoming a junkie) to ridiculous attempts at emotional gravity ('The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud', 'Cygnet Committee') to, ultimately, air-headed flower-power atrocities ('An Occasional Dream'). He's generally 'sensitive' throughout, still not gaining the foothold on any emotions other than gentle irony and treacly hippie communalism, and his songs are nearly all lightweight acoustic strumalongs fleshed out with a Moody Blues-patented orchestra here and there, especially the barren second side, all of which makes for a mighty samey listen before its all said and done. It's not one that's completely bereft of decent moments, though. 'God Knows I'm Good' is a good song lost beneath its singlemindedly folky exterior, and the rocking (and electric!) Man Who Sold the World preview 'Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed' is good cock-rocking fun. Still, when you attempt to cross Dylan and Pink Floyd and end up crossing Barry McGwire and the Strawberry Alarm Clock, there's just not very far a genial persona and some ugly chords can take you.
Capn's Final Word: This album's known as 'The One with Major Tom on it', and that's about as much as is healthy to know.
Alan
Brooks
kerry_prez@yahoo.com Your Rating: C
Any Short Comments?: Until now I unconsciously thought this album was
recorded 1972 since the title track was played very frequently here in America
all through 1973, the same year as the Elton John hit single 'Rocket Man' was
also being endlessly played (back then I thought the two singer/songwriters were
trying to start an astronaut song genre, or something) But as Capn revealed to
me here 'Space Oddity' was recorded in 1968, during the psychedelic era. Still,
it sounds very early '70s. A clever marketing ploy.
I was about ready to say 'Bowie got it right', but I don't know if that's quite accurate...did he ever 'get it right'? Not even my favoritest Bowie platters are close to being flawless, but, like this one, are interesting enough to keep me saying 'hell yeah, that's a record!'. On Sold, our boy discovers hard rock, darkness, sexuality, and Mick Ronson, all of which were good enough for Mr. Bowie to cash into the bank a couple of years later and are good enough to lay out one of his most interesting albums right now. The transformation in sound and approach between Oddity and this one is a gulf like the one between Sandra Bernhardt's two front chompers...the guy singing this album is not a spacey hippie whatsoever - he's a doped-up Satanist metalhead sex fiend who talks about gay fucking and killing Gooks. He may be doing it in the spirit of irony, but with Bowie, who the fuck knows? If there's ever been a fascist rock star, it's Roger Waters, but if there's ever been a fascist rock star who was photographed wearing a housedress for an album cover, it's David Bowie. And you know what? I dig the Nazi grooves of this album in all its sludgy, shades-of-grey-and-brown glory, and not just because the mood is cantankerous and the guitars loud, though I have to admit that has something to do with it. I also like that Bowie's stopped his idealism cold, leaving himself with only his close friends - nutballs, military murderers, misguided scientists, and, of course, gay dudes who fuck a lot. It's a veritable funhouse of weirdness ala Alice Cooper, though David's ice-king Yurrupian weirdo delivery trumps ol' Alice's late-show hootin' and hollerin' in terms of not giving the ghost away too early. And all of these hard-luck tales of everyday Joes (as long as your Joe is Joe Stalin) are played over loose, funky hard rock grooves that are the brainchild of Mr. Ronson, sorta a proto-punk guitar hero that combines the thick riffing of a Tony Iommi with the boy-racer rootsiness of a Keith Richards in a catchy, flashy, but not chokingly daunting flurry of good ol' hard-rockin' notes. Bowie goes all Iggy Pop over the top and the rhythm section just tries to stick with it (sometimes, they don't.)
Songwise, we somehow start with a Paranoid-influenced 8-minute ode to being young, gay, and horny called 'Width Of A Circle', which might as well be renamed 'How Round My Arsehole' after hearing the middle section, a blow-by-blow of a sexual encounter that's so uncomfortably homoerotic I heard it made Jerry Fallwell have to change his trousers. The riffing, however, is addictive, and the twisting and turning of this slimy epic is never dull. 'All The Madmen' is also Sabbath-ing its way through a slow, grindy rocker with Bowie doing a Thorazined-out asylum resident's-eye view of the world wherein he proclaims he'd 'rather play here with all the madmen that perish with all the sad men going free', but 'Black Country Rock' is funky and upbeat, like, I dunno, early Doobie Brothers or something, though God knows why everyone says it sounds like T. Rex. Christ, what the fuck ever! The T. Rex album, the one where Bolan finally started his own glam movement at last, came out the same year as this one...do we really think that Bowie had time to hear that album, write a ripoff tune, and record it in less than a few months? If they're ripping from anybody, they're both stealing the Stones blind, anyway, so the point's fucking moot. Bowie also does some weird wavery things with his voice, later ripped off by Bryan Ferry on the first Roxy Music album, and the constant tempo changes had to make an impression on Phil Manzanera, who generally cops his entire game from Ronson, anyway.
The chanting 'After All', one of the weirder tracks here, does nothing more than sustain the off-putting child's asylum feeling of this record, but 'Running Gun Blues' takes the cake for obscenity, as Bowie takes the place of a bloodthirsty soldier who kills 'Gooks' (and 'a few civilians') and feels quite happy the protesters haven't been successful in stopping the war yet, thank you. The Southern-rock/prog hybrid backing music is fucking wicked sludgy, but infests your head nonetheless, and though it might make your skin crawl, who's to say David hasn't struck upon an original point of view on the whole anti-war song? I mean, until Slayer came along, there weren't too many people who could convincingly embody themselves as a person who thrives on war and not sound preachy like Joan Baez or something...cartoonish, yeah, but maybe this guy's head is cartoonish, after all.
Anyway, the rest of the album pretty much keeps on the same track, and mostly we have a case of how hard you want your song to be. 'Savior Machine' sure sounds like it wants to be Yes (though, again, I'll remind you that Yes was pretty fucking young when this album came out), 'She Shook Me Cold' sounds like Bowie's been slipped a Roofie, and 'The Supermen' is an interesting variation on Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song', though not as immediately catchy or hilarious. The title track, however, is a light revisitation of the astral-folk Oddity sound (though with a conspicuous lead guitar, admittedly), though the lyrics, a very disturbing look at the end of the world from the eyes of a non-survivor, fit in with the fucked/downer feel of this record perfectly. And who can forget that lead line that Kurt Cobain so famously (and, well, somehow wonderfully) screwed up at his Unplugged performance? A marvelous song, and part of a pretty marvelous record, if you can stand it.
Man Who Sold The World allowed Bowie to break clean free of any residual dependence on hopefulness and optimism that had sustained his career so far, and neither of which would serve him too well in the next several years. The Seventies were defined by Bowie as a time when image and impenetrable psychic defense ruled over any quest for meaning, and in fact became the meaning. The difference between Bowie before and after this album is that before, you could listen to him and scoff that he didn't have any clue what he was singing about...now he's making his own legends and daring you to figure out if they're really true or not, painting the slums with his distortion and giving all the hoods free razor blades, and though it's not a pretty picture, it's one I can't help get suckered into every time.
Capn's Final Word: See the sludge, be the sludge. Bowie grows teeth and says 'fuck it'.
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Okay, so Bowie armed himself with The Man Who Shaved His Wang, but before taking his dystopian notions to some sort of fantastic extreme with his Ziggy phase, he takes a little step back to thank his elders and warn us of what is about to come with Hunky Dory, probably the major anomaly in the Bowie catalog. I mean, you can see his progression from his debut to Oddity, and even follow how Oddity could become Sold, but for Sold not to transition straight into a motherfucking Ziggy Stardust glam meltdown, but rather to detour on into this mostly melodic, mostly poppy, mostly sincere little record is flat out biz-arre. A comparison, for you Neil Young fans out there, is if ol' Neil would've put out Harvest in between On The Beach and Tonight's The Night...it's jarring to say the least. And while Hunky Dory is lovable (much more loveable for the average listener than Man or Ziggy, for sure), its also spotty and waaaaaaay overrated by people who want Bowie to be John Lennon instead of, you know, whoever Bowie wants to be this week. But Bowie, for the last time for quite awhile, actually makes a clear, unambiguous statement about his own art, warning in the defining 'Changes' that things are about to get 'strange', and letting us know that whatever happens, it's just the 'phase I'm going through'. This apparently tried to head off anyone dumb enough to get angry when, say, Bowie traded a leisure suit and white leather loafers for a spaceman outfit and sequined platform boots in 1974 - that no matter how much success ol' David has in one phase or another, you just can't put Baby in a corner. 'Changes' is a lounge song apparently based on the sound of some British crooner named Anthony Newly, but it's also catchy as syphilis and that singalong chorus of 'Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!' is undeniably great. This album's a bit short on hooks, but the title track sure ain't one of the have-nots.
The rest of the album is split into two parts - the melodic and often playful show-tune section and the more pretentious and lumbering 'homage' section. There's also a stupid piece of Oddity-outtake crap called the 'Belway Brothers' at the end, but since they say I should stop spending so damn much time inside in front of a computer screen and get my ass out to mow the lawn and wash the cars, I guess I'll let this review continue without pausing on it. Sucks. There.
Anyway, from the chorus-line fun of the almost unironic 'Oh! You Pretty Things' and 'Kooks', which was written for his young (thirty five years ago) son Zowie Bowie (and, no, I didn't make that name up. Zowie. Bowie. Not only does it rhyme with the last name, it's also a sound that Jughead would make in the old Archie comics. Your name...a cartoonish expression of surprise...might as well just call yourself '!"). 'Eight Line Poem' is a torchy piano ding-dong that seems ripped from the likes of Elton John's first couple of albums and mostly sucks, but the similarly piano-ridden 'Life On Mars' is just frigging wonderful. Melodies, melodies, melodies...and Bowie sings like he means it, which is one of those things you just don't get every day. Melodies can also cover up some pretty ugly lyrics, like those in the anti-religious tirade 'Quicksand' (namedropping famous Nazis ain't gonna get you anywhere anyhow), and not even Bowie sounds like he believes in the idiotic doowop 'Fill Your Heart', where the man's voice sounds pinchy and fey, just like we don't like it.
Anyway, starting with the electronic blurpy noises that begin 'Andy Warhol' through the glam headbang of 'Queen Bitch', we enter a three-song PG-13 zone that tips a wig to Bowie's three big influences: Larry, Moe, and Curly. No, really...'Andy Warhol' sings touchingly about the art of sticking your fingers into someone's eyesockets, and 'Song For Bob Dylan' mentions Shemp not less than four times, but Robert Zimmerman not once....
Okay, sorry, I accidentally loaded my copy of C+C Music Factory's Remix album into my Winamp instead of David Bowie's dumb second half of Hunny Dorky. 'Andy Warhol' sounds very much like a Sold outtake, dark acoustic chords and all that, 'Song For Dylan' sounds a lot like Lynyrd Skynyd with a bisexual British knob singing instead of Ronnie Van Zandt. and God only knows why because Bowie keeps referring to a 'she' instead of 'Bob' or 'Hey you Kermit-voice!', and. well, 'Queen Bitch' is glam-rockin' good fun like we'd hoped for, and though it sounds as much like the Velvet Underground as it does Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, I suppose the lead singers of both band are gayer than a Ford Focus, so at least we're in the ballpark. Love that guitar tone...sounds like Mick's changed out his speaker for an empty can of Folger's coffee or sumthin'.
Anyway, this album's awright, but in the grand ol' scheme I like it better when Bowie's looking forward rather than up his arsehole, and if his band and energy hadn't been at a sort of young-dude peak around this time, I bet we could've easily come out with another Oddity-style folky flakeout. Otherwise, if you feel a lot of David's 70's work is overly cold and contrived, and you wish to have a better taste of the man himself (eeew! why?), then probably Harem Scarem is the answer. Me, I don't quite trust it...I think ol' Bow's actually less sincere when he's like this than when he's at his most mechanical, because hell, he's a mechanical kind of guy. Alien, you know.
Capn's Final Word: Cuetsy, crunchy, crass 'n' crappy navel gazing by Sir Nose D'voidoffunk. Melodic, but I won't hold that against him.
Nathan Harper
nator9999@comcast.net Your Rating: B
Any Short Comments?: I concur (I hate that word)! For some bizarre reason
lots of people think this is his best, but it comes nowhere close to Ziggy,
Station, Low, or Heroes. There are four REALLY REALLY good songs, and the rest
range from OK to crap. 'Changes,' 'Pretty Things,' 'Life on Mars,' and 'Queen
Bitch' blow my mind. 'Andy Warhol,' 'Quicksand,' and 'Song for Bob Dylan' are
pretty good, but obviously nothing to write home about. The rest blows. Still,
if you haven't heard those first four songs yet, you should definitely check it
out.
Mike
Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: You know, I've never actually heard this album, but I
had to say that Zowie Bowie's real name isn't Zowie, but Duncan. I think the
whole Zowie thing was one of David's publicity stunts.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
- RCA 1972
Okay, probably this one's lost a lot since all the 13-year old British kids who worshipped it like the second coming of Naked Lunch all grew up to become loyal Tories and decry Tony Blair for being 'too radical', and it sure the hell doesn't fit very well into the round peg of 'Glam Rock' like it's supposed to, but there's still something to this whacked-out and not entirely cohesive concept album about An Alien Rock Star At The End Of The World. I guess this is finally where Bowie's theatrical training comes into full use as he transforms himself from an asexual, hard rocking, loungey half-folkie crossdresser into an asexual, hard-rocking loungey half-folkie crossdresser with an orange, poofy 'do that would later influence the hair stylings of many generations of Indigo Girls fans. I still say this's got it all over Hunky Dory both for unity of feel and quality of performance, plus having two of Bowie's greatest ever songs done in a balls-out style he'd have trouble repeating ever again. Other than that, don't be surprised if stretches of Ziggy seem to be coasting on fumes 'til we get to the pyrotechnic fourth quarter, when all the marbles come a-spillin' and the album suddenly doesn't seem like such a horrible waste of time and money.
Ziggy starts off with the oddly touching 'Five Years' announcing that the end of the world is just that far away, which is awfully funny since it's never mentioned ever again. Still, it sets a morbid mood (much like the gloomy, rainy album cover that's somehow still rock 'n' roll as a motherfucker. I happen to own a t-shirt of it that's still in regular rotation even after 5 years and a trip to Russia) that somehow gets maintained through the entire running time, on through otherwise musically upbeat songs like 'Soul Love' or 'Starman' and finally ending up in the crash-and-burn decadent end. Everything's rendered a bit creepy, a bit dark, just by this setup song and the arc it creates...neat stuff. After a couple of more or less conceptually useless songs, Ziggy makes himself known to the world, becomes a rock star, gets fucked up on fame (as if you didn't know this was the best part of the album), and ends up killing himself in a very drama-queen sorta way. Now, let's not get things wrong here - Bowie's essentially retelling the last third of the Who's Tommy with ol' Tom as a Martian Rock Star Messiah instead of a Pinball Player Messiah (except Ziggy doesn't ever get his 'revelation' at the end), and there's a similar amount of 'Sally Simpson'-y Ziggy Devotional filler stuff like 'Lady Stardust' (that talks of a trip to a Ziggy concert where 'he really was outta sight'...originally it was written for Marc Bolan of T. Rex fame, which I guess is pretty nice of Bowie, who probably just wanted Bolan not to sue him for stealing his act) and 'Rock and Roll Star', which pretty much has ol' Zig exclaiming 'I know! I'll start a rock band!' for three minutes. As a concept, it's spottier than a motherfucker....all of the important narrative is crammed into the title track, and all of the raw emotion crammed into 'Suffragette City', leaving the rest as a decent, if oddly unremarkable bunch of Bowiesongs that run the gamut from disgusting ('Rock 'n' Roll Suicide') to ecstatic ('Hang On To Yourself') and all the more boring points in between. I mean, hell, they're not bad melodically, and lyrically they're not any worse than we've heard from the man before, but what the motherfucking Edwin Newman is up with all these torchy piano ballads like 'Lady Stardust' (Elton John on the rag) and 'Starman' (David Bowie crossed with Abbey Road)? Call it filler if you like, I divide this album into 'good stuff' and 'stuff I wait patiently through to get to the good stuff', and if you didn't know already, I pretty much define 'good stuff' as 'shit that rocks', at least in terms of this album. The rest, as I said, coasts by on this hazy conceptual thread, and just isn't all that exciting. Crap, maybe in another life I'll be able to recognize the good melodies for what they are, but for now I want to be able to TURN IT THE FUCK UP, just like it SAYS ON THE FUCKING ALBUM JACKET, right next to PLEASE DON'T MAKE BOOTLEG COPIES OF THIS ALBUM AND SELL THEM OUT OF YOUR TRUNK TO RAISE MONEY TO BUY DRUGS WITH.
Anyway, it all comes together starting with the speedy Judy Punk 'Hang On To Yourself' (cautionary tale...rock 'n' roll might just reach up and bite you in the ass) which breaks into the epic monster title track featuring a bystander (assumedly a Spider) telling of Ziggy's descent into egoism and dickheadedness, barely masking the teeth-gritting anger of the narrator at ol' Zig and his wicked, wicked ways. If things are already falling apart between Ziggy and his pals on 'Ziggy Stardust', 'Suffragette City' is Zig blowing himself to bits on the inside, set to a manic, monstrous rocking riff that prefigures punk and a hysterical vernacular that somehow injects the feeling of a meth jag right there into a three-minute rock tune - the lack on concentration, the paranoia, the elation....awww yeah, man, crunch up some Sudafeds and scrape me some matchheads, because it's speedfreak time again, baby.
Unfortunately every drug marathon has an inevitable crash, and this album has its 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide', which could've easily been a bare-nerve saltshake like what Lou Reed would perfect on his wormy-underbelly Berlin album, Bowie takes a relatively easy way out by having ol' Zig go out in a highly overdramatized Greta Garbo way, pulling on his finger, then another finger, then a cigarette and pleading for forgiveness and understanding like Liza Minnelli after puking on Grace Jones at Studio 54 (the yelps of 'Oh no love! You're NOT ALONE!!' that finish it off, both literally and figuratively, are like 13-year-old self-absorptive messiah complexes come to life and rampaging down Main Street on the way to level the Empire State Building) . No, it makes a damn goose egg worth of sense and is one of the more disappointing conclusions to a concept album I can think of, but what the hell...while Ziggy Stardust takes a while to finally get moving, the peak is high, and the concluding dropoff precarious. It's simply not a smooth ride, and while this might be one of the reasons people find it interesting (it's one of those albums that some people just don't get, therefore leaving some of the people to feel like they're in some exclusive club, like Radiohead fans who claim to 'get' Amnesiac and therefore feel that they're on some list to have ol' Thom Yorke come and give them a pat on the head for being so clever or something), it's also quite alright to think that Bowie could've done a better job than he did. Still, a handful of classics reside here, and you should probably schedule to hear it at least once, at least for historical perspective of what it felt like to be a 13 year old who 'just didn't fit in' back in '72.
Capn's Final Word: Image triumphs despite taking its own sweet time about it. Glam? Uh uh. Glammy? Awww, yeah.
Nathan Harper
nator9999@comcast.net Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: I used to like it more than I do now. 'It Ain't Easy,'
'Lady Stardust,' and a few others are kinda boring, but once again the
highlights are all really great. My favorite is the title track...probably
created legions of these goth bands like Bauhaus and the like. His falsetto is
so ridiculous too, I absolutely love it. 'Sufragette City' just kicks ass (WHAM
BAM THANK YOU MA'AM!), and 'Rock N Roll Suicide' is gorgeously campy and
overblown. I like it.
LaughingGnome
Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: Greatest rock album ever made. You should listen to this
album several dozen times before calling yourself a "rock fan". Not a bad song,
they all come together and flow so well. The SACD version is an awesome
experience.
(Capn's Response: Okay, so I took Keith Richards, knocked him over the head, tied him up and dragged him to my basement. I then made him listen to this album 10 times sequentially. He had not previously heard it more than half a time (during which he called it 'fooking geezer trollop') previously. Can I now call Keith Richards a rock fan?)
Noreen Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: Since I first bought this in 7th grade it has been one
of my top five albums of all time!
(Capn's Response: So, have you
graduated to 8th grade yet?)
TC
tcalla7256@aol.com Your Rating: B-
Any Short Comments?: There is nothing original on this record. Bowie is
rehashing Alice Cooper from 1969-71 (ask his band, they'll tell you...), with
the Beatles and the Velvets thrown in for good measure.
Sure it's a good record. However, there's not an original thought in any
of Bowie's recorded work. He's as good as the guitar player who he has
hooked-up with. Which is why he gets a B- on this one.
Akis Katsman
watta502@yahoo.gr Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: This album is in my top 20 albums ever made, if I make
such a list. All the songs are excellent, especially "Five Years" and "Starman"
which have breathtaking choruses. If you ask me, the best thing about that album
is how it alternates between mean rockers and piano ballads. David Bowie never
made again such a great album although some others like 'Low' are excellent as
well.
Brian Dickson
Your Rating: B+
Any Short Comments?: It took me about ten years to realise a simple fact-
David Bowie is the fakest major performer in rock history. Almost everything
I've heard from him has an artificial, calculated feel to it. I get the
impression that each album he makes is not an artistic statement, but more
a cunning plan to milk the current music fads for all their worth. Maybe
that's not true *all* the time, but one thing is clear, David Bowie does care a
great deal about what the mainstream record buying public think of him.
However the fact that he lacks sincerity in what he does doesn't neccesarily
mean that his music is bad. A lot of it is pure throwaway rubbish but when he
gets it right he can actuallly come up with some catchy music, and Ziggy
Stardust is probably his best album, along with The Man Who Sold The World.
Although I did find the much maligned Tin Machine surprisingly good.
In truth the name David Bowie generally makes me want to hurl these days, but I
was actually a fan of some of his ealier work at some point.
Aladdin Sane
- RCA 1973.
The first Bowie album that fails to grow appreciably over its predecessor, if not in quality than at least in diversity, and one that finds Bowie oddly unsure of himself. This is essentially Ziggy's comeback sans concept or attempts at meaning, a rather simplistic set of 10 sci-fi fever dreams and excuses to posture shamelessly. Of course, nobody quite postured shamelessly like ol' David here, and his band was still one of the better fast-rock outfits of the early 70's, so maybe marking time was better than shooting the whole Glam wad into the bin and starting over in 1973 as David Bowie the One-Legged Jazz-Fusion Prog-Folk Saxophonist or something (though *hey!* Philly soul inflections still show up on one or two tracks! That thar's a foreshadowing, ladies and rapers, all of you who didn't spend 12th grade English class snorting meth off the lunch ladies' ample bosoms in the custodian's closet!). A quick listen gives up the classic nonsensical stomp-rocker 'Jean Genie', the savage 'Cracked Actor' and 'Panic In Detroit', and the ecstatic 'Watch That Man', very good Spiders rockers each one. Good, that is, probably thanks more to the band than Bowie's writing skills, which never much advance beyond the 'hook with words that sound cool together' level into something special like 'Ziggy Stardust' from last time. 'Cracked Actor' is pretty acidic, I suppose, with Bowie cajoling his subject to 'crack baby crack, show me you're real', which I guess is what just about everybody wanted Bowie to do at the same time (along with wanting him to 'suck baby suck', but that's another story for another bottle of Robitussin), but the rest of these are 'Suffragette City' re-spins only. That's not bad considering most bands reconfigure and rerelease their best songs much more than Bowie did, and 'Suffragette City's a kickass song, so, you know...cool. And stuff.
The slow songs and the points at which Bowie decides to get his fingers all up in the mix with his wacky, waxy artistry is where this album begins to feel like it's a hefty two hours long when it's really only 40 minutes. Bowie is into big band, lotsa piano, lotsa saxophone overstatement this time around, so a song like 'Time', which on Hunky Dory would've been small and cute, begins to weigh a bazillion pounds and have this crazy Nazi cabaret section that sounds like a reject from Springtime for Hitler. and 'Aladdin Sane' sees its impact blunted by a 'moody' bit of atonal piano banging so ineffective that would make Ornette Coleman laugh until he dropped his plastic saxophone in the mud. There's a core of goodness in these songs that's lost in this thick, mucky 'decadence' that seems, well, more acting that reality. 'Drive In Saturday' is a doo-wop send-up about kids in the future sent to a class where they are taught how to fuck in the backseat of a car by watching old movies. It's a 'crash course for the rapers', as Bowie calls it, so wittingly unromantic it makes me want to puke on the poison horn parts that ruin this song, and without the lyric sheet in my hand I never have enjoyed this flat song. 'The Prettiest Star' is also doo-wop, but it doesn't even have a decent little story to relate to you readers, which means it's damn near useless to me. And tell me - what's with Brits always reducing music to blues, doowop, and dancehall when they want to be ironic and silly? Whatever the answer is, Bowie could take a lesson from Ray Davies, a guy who always did the 'reductionist' thing better than anyone else anyhow....
Oh, and Bowie and the Spiders deconstruct the Stones 'Let's Spend The Night Together' by combining 'Drive In Saturday's whingy synths, 'Aladdin Sane's piano molestation, 'Panic In Detroit's metallic guitars, 'Jean Genie's' vocals, and some of the loudest fucking cymbals ever put on tape in a monstrous pile of unlistenable shit that would soon be extended into an entire album of covers called Pin Ups, which was supposed to somehow 'honor' Bowie's favorite rock songs of six years before by making people think they somehow sound as inept and vomit-worthy as this. Fa! I say! Fa on you, Bowie! Copy, my man, do NOT interpret. No one wants to hear perfectly good songs run through the Bowiefilter, but again...that's a discussion for another day.
Aladdin Sane isn't a bad record, and probably in the context of 'an album a year' that used to predominate in the record industry, it was a pretty darned good followup that kept the kids wanting more guitar crunch and Bowie crotch shots. But our boy was already getting bored with just teaching old Spiders new tricks, and was busily looking for the next world to conquer. In short, good rockers nearly derailed by some wiggy excuses for art songs.
Capn's Final Word: Bowie marks time by getting deeper into the decadence.
Crappy
ideas are crappy ideas no matter who you have playing your riffs, and I'd like
to hereby nominate Sir Boo-ie's covers album Pin Ups as one of the worse
ideas he's ever had, right up there with marrying Yoko Ono and taking the free
seat in the airplane while Waylon Jennings stayed behind to do some laundry.
This essentially takes 'Let's Spend The Night Together' from Aladdin Sane
and spins it out into an album-length collection of similar mid-60's mod/Merseybeat
covers torn up by the Spiders from Mars and spit out by David's decidedly
disrespectable vocal treatment. Now, I have no problem at all with the songs
chosen for inclusion - there's a nice mix of the famous and familiar (the Kinks'
'Where Have All The Good Times Gone?', the Who's 'Anyway Anyhow Anywhere' and 'I
Can't Explain') second-tier gems (Them's 'Here Comes The Night', the Yardbirds'
'Shapes of Things'), and stuff by people only fanatics and participants would
remember (the Merseys, the Mojos). But the songs generally all rate at least
decently (except for the idiotic doowop 'Sorrow', which would, in some obscene
twist, influence Bowie's next phase far more than these other tracks), it's just
that Bowie and his band display little to no care in how they decide to cover
the songs. They obliterate some with overburdened arrangements and contrived
vocals that sound like the Late Late Show with that guy in the pancake makeup
and black satin cape who says 'booo!' all the time ('Here Comes The Night'), and
bore other songs into comatose submission ('I Can't Explain'). I guess Spider
fanatics will want to get their semi-annual fix of "Sick" Mick Ronson's
extra-chunky guitar riffage, but I prefer the live album to this, which amounts
to hearing some decent songs trampled on by a guy who could no longer separate
his good ideas from his bad ones. I guess you could blame it on cocaine, but
that'd be giving credit that Bowie knew what he was doing at some point....he
never did, he just hit upon the right formula once or twice after
innumerable tries If
there were a sense of goofy fun involved in these deconstructions, or any sense
that Bowie has any connection whatsoever to this material, it'd be different. I
don't doubt that these songs were a great influence on the man considering he
stole every last bit of them on his concurrent singles, collected on Early
Years, but Bowie sounds like he's doing these songs a favor more than he is
paying them a thank you. There's not even a glimmer that Bowie even
likes this stuff. How can you like a song like 'Shapes of Things' when you
sing it like the Monty Python Upperclass Twit of the Year and make a mockery of
the chorus by muddling up all the forceful chords and coating everything in a
slathering of cheap backwards echo, or ham-handedly mock Ray Davies' accent on
'Where Have All The Good Times Gone'? And when he plays it straight ('Anyhow,
Anyway, Anywhere'), the results are as lifeless as Elizabeth Taylor's Botox-encrusted
forehead. C'mon guys...you've got a good band, now punch it out like we know you
can! Anyway,
this was it for the ol' Spiders, as
Bowie fired 'em all after the completion of this stop-gap
record. Like the Beatles, they'd attempted to reunite themselves by 'getting
back' to their roots, except they found that they really don't have any. And
that, as they say, will get you every time. Capn's Final Word: Covers album
that inadvertently makes you hate Bowie's idols. Or was it intentional? Culling
the competition?
Tra McPeak
tramcpeak@mac.com Your Rating: A
Crunnnnch!
The one and only Bowie live album that you really need is actually the
soundtrack to the oddly mesmerizing concert film from his Aladdin Sane
tour, Ziggy Stardust, which pretty much consists of Bowie, Mick Ronson,
and the crowd wearing goofy glam spaceman/Elvis in Honolulu/aerobicizer outfits
and tons of makeup, a bunch of red spotlights, and some of the most gratuitous
on-stage simulated sex since Lambada: The Forbidden Dance. Soundtrack,
as is not always the case, does a great job of playing the video of the movie
and pressing 'record' on a tape machine, saving you the trouble of hooking your
tape deck into the stereo for you. There's no alternate version silliness or
any of that jazz - what you hear on the video is what you get on the CD, which
is refreshing after buying the soundtrack to Behind the Green Door and
getting a thinly disguised copy of Brian Eno's Another Green World
instead. Anyway,
Ziggy and the Spiders were on fire this night, as David apparently knew
ahead of time that this was the last time he was ever going to climb atop his
platform shoes and go onstage in his butt-pirate incarnation. After this show
he 'retired' from touring until 1974, when he returned as a cross between Robert
Goulet and a Montgomery Ward department store mannequin fronting a band full of
slick guys named Slick, pissing all of his Ziggy fans off but good. I'm not even
sure the Spiders knew what was going to happen, and the sound of the
crowd sobbing after Bowie announces that 'not only is this the last show on the
tour, this is the last show we'll ever do' shows that the 13 year old
transvestites didn't have a clue. Was he returning to Mars? Was he retiring to
the country to herd goats and read Tolstoy? Was he gonna kill himself like in
'Rock and Roll Suicide' that he so appropriately used as his finale? Well, shit,
man, it's Bowie, and he spent two years with the same poofy orange mullet! You
expect him to continue like this forever? He's a trend-setter with oodles of
hubris and a limited amount of talent who has to keep ahead of the envelope so
people don't have time to figure out that he actually isn't that miraculous, a
Madonna of the 1970's...what do you think he's gonna do? Anyway, all the
hubbub is premature - Ziggy would still be available on record album covers
until at least mid-1974, at which time Bowie dropped his hair-dye act until the
mid-1990's when he didn't have a clue what he was doing with himself.
Anyway,
whether it's because of the film crews or the retirement, Bowie gives it his all
throughout, commanding his stage with a cross between 'animal grace' and pure,
unadulterated punk energy, singing all of his tunes with full voice and
personality, something you'll never be able to get with either the distracted,
coked out David Live or the perfunctory Stage. On Live his
voice started cracking like that cyborg at the end of Terminator 2 once
he reached the third or fourth song, but here he keeps it pounding on through
the big ol' howls of 'Moonage Daydream' and on through the sprinting
'Suffragette City' and cover of 'White Light/White Heat' that close us out
before the encore, and he puts everything he can into keeping the energy level
at the breaking point.. Of course, it may also be that he still felt some
respect for his rock 'n' roll material while on Live he sounded like he'd
just as soon sing Ashford and Simpson covers for two hours as revisit his metal
years. Whatever happens, this is a punk record three years ahead of its
time (with the exception of, say, 'Time' and 'Space Oddity' and a few other slow
songs that fit in like Boy George at a Daughters of the American Revolution
convention), and for the stretches in which they are in full flight on his
Ziggy/Aladdin material are positively hammering. As if I need to tell you,
Mick Ronson plays his massive Les Paul guitar like a man barely controlling a
fire hose (as long as we're on the subject, Bowie plays his microphone like a
man barely able to control his fire hose), and the Spider rhythm section
pounds and doo-wops its background vocals like true champs, leaving us with a
show that, as long as the tempos remain fast and the guitar loud, may have a few
mistakes but sure sounds flawless. For all
this justifiable Bowie worship going on in this review (it is, as they
say, impossible to look away, or...ermm...plug your earholes. Or something.),
this show puts into great relief how lame some of Bowie's more pretentious early
work really is, as 'Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud' puts the opening bit of the
show to a screeching halt and the poison acoustic duo of 'Space Oddity' and 'My
Death' threaten to derail the motherfucker altogether. But as Ronson reattaches
his axe to his power outlet with a resounding 'SKKKREEAAAAWWWW!!!' at the
beginning of 'Cracked Actor', it's all washed away again and we're home free
through classic versions of a finally believable 'Time' when Bowie wills his
song over the crowd, a wonderfully fucked version of 'Width of a Circle', and
the breathless closing sequence until finally pulling into 'Rock and Roll
Suicide', which sounds not only perfectly fitting, but also perfectly sincere
when compared to the false Ziggy studio version. Like the
Grateful Dead and Rush, hearing the Spiders-era Bowie albums just doesn't have
the creative and energetic charge of hearing them live, making Soundtrack
from Ziggy Stardust (or the supposedly superior former bootleg
Santa Monica 1972) essential for people disappointed by Ziggy or
Aladdin, and absolutely required listening for fans of Bowie or glam (and
how can they be mutually exclusive, huh?) at all. And hell, fans of good ol
dirty-ass rock 'n' roll might just dig the crust out of it too. Capn's Final Word:
Just goes to show there was something to
watch and listen to. Sound and vision indeed.
Transitional
album, or just an unholy mating of cocaine paranoia and middlebrow literary
obsessions? I say it's just David Bowie pretty much being David Bowie, meaning a
man with not much of a firm grasp on his art or his quality producing product
that nonetheless somehow pulls itself off because of hubris and atmosphere and
the fact that no one has exactly played music like this before. Ostensibly,
Diamond Dogs is the third (even though I just now wrote 'tird' not once but
three times) album in the Ziggy trilogy, though that's not to be taken
literally, of course. Ziggy himself supposedly died at the end of the first
album, but this is still hard-chargin' sci-fi glam rock. To be honest, though,
it has quite a bit less to do with the other two from either a musical or
attitude standpoint. Musically, Bowie is deconstructing the Spiders big crunch
into simpler riffs while screwing in more atmospheric orchestras, background
vocalists, horns, and keyboards, which end up coming across, well...as R&B
music. His singing voice is also changing into more of a measured, stilted
croon. These two factors point to his upcoming redefinition as the first White
Anorexic in the Gamble and Huff soul empire, but the themes of this record - a
numbing excursion into fascism, thought-control, and apocalyptica, all run
through a fairly rudimentary Orwell interpretation - are like Ziggy Stardust
after a bad plate of curry chicken. You'd think the two sides, the soul
rumblings and the boot stomping a person's face for eternity, would mix like
cattlemen and vegans, but it turns out that Bowie actually makes a lot of this
album work. The truth is, it's uglier than Paris Hilton in good light, but it's
also strangely compelling in a pulpy, pre-goth sort of way. One theory exists
(because I just made it up) that Bowie was intentionally trying to lower the
audience's Ziggy/glam rock expectations by creating an album that most people
would be hard-pressed to truly love, but he was too commercially savvy not to
throw on at least one bone that his fanbase would scarf up like manna from
Himmel, 'Rebel Rebel'. This has one of Bowie's last true classic riffs and
lyrics that describe his teenage daydream fans and their image-obsessed
self-destructiveness to a tee ('hey babe you're hair's alright, hey babe, let's
go out tonight'). And, umm...that's all! The riff is the music, other
than some well-placed pauses and a four-bar lead-in to the chorus, anyway, and
the lyrics are nothing more than a revisitation of 'All The Young Dudes' (which
Bowie wrote for Mott the Hoople like Paul McCartney wrote 'Come and Get It' for
Badfinger) but are still affecting in that perfect time-and-place setting. I
feel glam when I hear this song, and that's no mean trick. The rest
of the album is alternately oppressive and yucky ('We Are the Dead'), sweeping
and bizarre (the Isaac Hayes tribute '1984', which everyone talks about like
it’s not a complete ripoff. Other reviewers are complete blathering
idiots, all of them, because not a damn one of them listens to soul music. I
do, I just don't review it.), or just completely random ('Sweet Thing', a
two-part soul ballad that I guess refers to Winston's girlfriend, or maybe just
to a really top-notch gram of coke that Bowie bought once. I'm sure I'm
supposed to be following some sort of a story here, but I really can't be arsed
to spare the brain cells currently trying breathlessly to come up with another
snappy euphemism for excrement). Still, as repulsive as some of this music is
('Candidate' is simply gross, and God give me strength to make it through 'Chant
of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family' without throwing up a little bit into my
mouth), it's also consistently interesting and no one can question the quality
of Bowie's performance. His voice is used better and with wider variation that
we've heard it before, and his guitar and sax playing comes to the fore now that
Ronson's not there to melt faces anymore. Sheeit, I know Bowie people who
readily embrace all his bullshit are money with this album, since I'm a
Bowie person who acknowledges all his bullshit and likes a lot of this album
anyway. If you're a more casual fan you might find it a bit too gross and
confusing as I did for a long time. If you're not sure which group you fall
into, try this little test - if you can look at the album cover and not feel all
queasy inside like you just walked in on your mother putting on pantyhose,
you've got yourself a purchase. Now, if you look at the cover of Aladdin
Sane and feel all gooky inside, you're probably either a homophobe or a
Republican or both and don't need to be listening to David Bowie in the first
place, and if you don't like the cover of Ziggy Stardust you need to
remove the dogshit from your brain casing. Capn's Final Word: David
at his most psychically fucked up makes mediocre art that's still mighty
listenable. Then again, he did that when he was perfectly healthy, too.
Any Short Comments?: The Pin Ups tape got stuck in my car's player and I was
forced to listen to it or nothing for a whole summer. By fall the whole
town was singing every song. And loving it. I think it's brilliant.
So David Bowie is a guy I find infinitely easy to criticize and make fun of, but if you were to walk up to me on the street, corner me with a mean dog and ask me if I liked him, really liked him, I'd say 'sure!' without a lot of struggle, which I probably wouldn't be able to do with, say, Queen even. I really really enjoy his best work, and find most of his crappy work at least halfway enjoyable and not a stultifying chore to listen to like all those Seventies Beach Boys albums I just reviewed. But David Live is a low point, and it's completely indefensible. I have an awful time listening to it, and probably have made it through both albums only under some hazy rationalization that I 'had' to so I would write a decent, balanced review. Well, fuck that right in the nostril, because this is one unbalanced album...Bowie's tipped the scales so badly in his disfavor that when you list out the facts regarding this album you can't help but create the impression that the man was actually trying to sabotage his own career at the time, sort of a half-assed live Self Portrait or something. Let's investigate in a biased and childish way, shall we?
- This tour was originally intended to be one final blowout of the Ziggy/Dogs character, but the personnel, sets, and concept were changed completely at the last second after his split with the Spiders.
- David's replacement band was a large outfit with prominent horns and backup singers, laiiiiid back drumming, and timid guitar playing that is obviously built for soul music.
- The cover proudly proclaims that the concert was recorded in Philadelphia, attempting to ally the man with the whole Gamble/Huff Philly sound phenomenon that had captured Bowie's imagination.
This was obviously intended as a soul album, yet
- The only soul song he sings is the old track 'Knock On Wood', later covered by Amii Stewart as a famous latter-days of disco song. The rest of the songs are from the 1970-1974 era, which is comprised of songs that are decidedly not soul material. But they're played like that regardless. 'Width of a Circle'. 'Suffragette City'. 'Rebel Rebel'. All rock songs played by a soul band who has no idea how to play rock songs so they end up like soul songs.
This would be weird, but potentially acceptable, even intriguing, (see Dylan's Live at Budokan) except that:
- This was a double live album recorded on Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour, but only contains five songs (out of a total of twenty) from that album, and he's completely, obviously disinterested in those.
- The Diamond Dogs material is the best stuff on here
Yikes! But that's as bad as it gets, right? I mean, come on, you have to say something positive!
No. To wit:
- Sax player David Sanborn sounds like he's trying out for the Saturday Night Live Band with his neverending showboat wailing.
- The guitars are distorted enough to negate the soul sound, yet not loud enough to dominate.
- Whenever Earl Slick solos, which is a lot of the time, he sounds just like the guy from Big Brother and the Holding Company.
- Bowie seems to think that singing soulfully is to whine and caterwaul tunelessly as long as it's done with emotional intensity.
- Bowie's voice begins to falter during 'Sweet Thing' and begins to fail completely during 'Changes'. These are the fourth and fifth songs of the concert. It continues to degenerate from there, meaning he can't even whine and caterwaul tunelessly like he wants to. The background singers get louder as Bowie gets quieter.
- He closes with 'Time'.
And anyway, who wants an album that features
- Bowie wearing an ill-fitting white leisure suit and an Arthur Fonzarelli hairdo on the cover?
Capn's Final Word: You go right ahead. I'll be waiting for you back here with these rubber waders on.
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You know? I actually listen to this album more often than I do probably any Bowie record other than Low or Station to Station, though for the life of me I can't explain from a critical standpoint why that is. Perhaps it's because despite being crammed full of tasteless, insubstantial 'plastic soul' it's still more of a cohesive statement than Bowie's made in years and has as many all-time classic Bowie tracks (two) as any of the last three albums, or perhaps its just because I like to shake my pale white booty to the Eminem of the Philly Sound and am a closet sucker for proto-disco. Whatever it is, I'll admit that this album is truly, undeniably ''throwaway', meant to be played in the background at a couple of mid-70's swing parties and then tossed aside and replaced by the next season's model. That's what a lot of soul (and, incidentally, rap and dance) music is...it's not meant to be trundled out thirty years later and looked at under a microscope to decide it's meaningless and dated. Just like you can't watch Bergman and Tarkovsky films all the time without taking a break to see a Zoolander or a Naked Gun every once in awhile, you can't listen to 'serious' rock music without every once in awhile just listening to something stupid, pandering, and formulaic that still manages to kill as background music. And just like you can't listen to a rap album from 1992 without hearing a bunch of anachronistic Rodney King references, you can't listen to a soul album from 1975 and not hear sappy romanticism and 'romantic' saxophone solos, especially one by a cokehead white English dude who was a year or two removed from fellating his guitar player right up onstage! And anyway, how much worse of a treatment of mid-70's smooth soul is Young Americans than, say, the Young Rascals were doing to mid-60's hard soul seven years before? What about the Kinks and their mediocre series of blues albums in the mid-60'sThey were both slavishly copying a trendy movement in black music for their own ends, when they were probably better suited sticking to music they were more familiar with. There aren't too many people who had the guts to even try this stuff, and fewer got it even close to being right. I say Bowie didn't do a bad job of it, which leads to the question of whether he even should've done it at all - light, jazzy proto-disco isn't necessarily in possession of a great excess of artistic substance, you know. And neither is Young Americans...this is an album that gets by on snappy beats and (sometimes) Bowie's singing, and when those two factors don't mutt the custard, you've got a ten ton bore sitting on your chest. And that's exactly what happens whenever the tempos get slow on this album - the opening title track is snappy and bittersweet, a revisitation of the Rebel Rebel we met on his last album, now out of place from ripping stars off her face. The feel is rollicking and positive, and Bowie exudes enough charisma to make Don Cornelius consider him for a spot on Soul Train, which is exactly what happened...and if you've ever seen a man look MORE like a cokehead than Bowie did up there lipsyncing on that stage, you're probably David Crosby's butler or something. Anyway, that's the last of that fresh, sunny feeling...the rest of this album is languid and smoky (as languid and smoky as, well...David Crosby...the jerk!), finally becoming downright obscene and decadent with the closing funk hit 'Fame'. Now, I mostly associate 'Fame' with the music that Tommy danced along to in the 'Mystery Stripper' episode of Eight Is Enough, but suffice it to say that this is poison dancefloor...funky as you ever wanna be, and with these paranoiac background vocals that sound like the echoes of a schizophrenic mind. A monster hit, and as dark, elusive, and persuasive as the disco era ever got. Those are John Lennon, by the way, though I have a hard time identifying that it's actually his drunk ass and not just some random dude (kind of like how Bowie's supposed to sing backup on the Stones' 'It's Only Rock and Roll'...I'll have to take your word for it). Now on the cover of 'Across The Universe', it's clear ol' John Boy's back there, and I'm sure he wholeheartedly embraced the fact that Bowie was rerecording his Let It Be song in a throwaway, trendy arrangement with some of the most distasteful vocal acrobatics of Bowie's career, since the guy was just as reverent towards his own back catalogue as Bowie was. They were two peas in a pod, John and Dave, since neither one of them had any clue what they were doing with their careers at the time and were spending most of their time partying until their eyes bled. All you needed was Nilsson and you've got the Tanqueray Triumverate on your hands.
The rest of the album is wholly forgettable, with the only marginal exception being 'Fascination', which is a fairly decent dance track. The rest all run on way too long (they are meant for dancing, you know), feature waaaaay too much of David Sanborn's banal sax twiddling, and are pretty thinly written tracks. 'Right' takes Marvin Gaye's I Want You sound and drains out the blood, 'Somebody Up There Likes Me' sounds like fucking Billy Joel, and 'Can You Hear Me' is a ballad with nowhere to go and no gas to get there with. But none of the tracks are wretched, just none of them are too substantial, and of course there's all that ever-present 'insincerity' that pretty much saturates anything David Bowie gets within half a mile of. This is all disposable music, and you don't get much of a chance to forget it outside of the two hits.
I suppose most people will hate this record, and you'd be justified in doing so, but I still have a soft spot for it because it's so out of character for Bowie to make a Smooooooth Jazzzz classic like this and still manage to put a couple of winners on it, one of which is as bizarre and off-putting as anything he's put his name to.
Capn's Final Word: Just about as good as the throwaway mid-70's soul album it desperately wants to be.
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The beginning of David's highly respectable avant-garde era begins on Station to Station, the first of Bowies 70's albums to truly lean more towards pursuing some artistic goal rather than trying to get a maximum number of butts in the seats. This one was originally intended to be the soundtrack to Bowie's freaky-cool double-plus-decadent sci-fi flick The Man Who Fell to Earth (from which the cover photos of both Station to Station and Low are taken), but since that idea was scrapped, all we've got are some ultra-modern sounding tracks combining electronics and dancey soul music, standing on the verge of the full-blown experimentation of the soon-to-follow Eno trilogy but with one tendril still on solid ground, making Station to Station more immediately accessible to the average non-electronic listener. That's true in theory anyway, and the last time I paid any serious attention to a theory I ended up naked and covered in Vaseline, running headlong through St. Petersburg's Ploschad Vosstanyia in the middle of February in an ice storm. S2S is not made of of 'hit material' that your average drooling droogie would want to hear on the ol' AM Top 40 countdown, not like Young Americans did, anyway, and although there are serious disco tinges on a couple of these tracks, I'd say it's one weird sonofawhore who gets the ol' boogie stick whipping along to 'Station to Station'. Nope, this is essentially music to rock to, and that's where the strengths lie - Bowie hasn't rocked as consistently as he does on the title track or 'TVC15' or 'Stay' or 'Golden Years' since the Aladdin Sane times, and this album is unemcumbered by too much slimy 'decadence'...it's straight up ultramodern rock music with soul inflections, and it's some of Bowie's best material ever.
The title track announces Bowie's new self-coronation, that of the Thin White Duke. Considering how much cocaine he was cramming into his sinuses around this time, it's no wonder he was thin and white...the man looked like a cross between GQ and Nazi Death Camp Weekly, and there's some high-lar-yus documentary footage of him shot around this time showing him freaking out in the back of a limousine thinking he's being followed. Hours of good fun, I tells ya, much like the super-depraved Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by the same sicko that did Mick Jagger's Performance, both of which are 'fictional' but borrow what seem like huge cartoonish chunks of the daily realities of their respective stars. Anyway, 'Station to Station' supposedly relates the story of a three-day marathon journey by Bowie from L.A. to London (or something like that), and indeed we first hear the sounds of rushing trains (synthesized, of course) blasting back and forth across our brain topographies, followed by an ominous blast of feedback and rudimentary piano banging that slowly morphs into an oppressive bit of robotic rock/dance music, which only much later changes once again to a legitimately danceable groove to take us on through the glorious coda to the end. The entire song, all ten minutes of it, is a pure rush, and never feels overlong. Hell, if I could groove like this, I'd play 10 minute songs, too. Bowie claims 'It's not a side effect of the cocaine, I think it must be love', and hell, I don't believe him, but I'll thank him for the ride nonetheless. 'Golden Years', too...this oddly happy bit of doowop is as repetitive as 'Rebel Rebel' and groovy as 'Fame', but simply a little drop of pure, funky enjoyment. 'TVC15' is harder rocking than either of these two, and funnier - it's about Iggy Pop's hallucination that his television ate his girlfriend, except Bowie's lyrics express more envy for the girl's fate than remorse. It's a pleasure machine, baby, much like this song....hearing the modulation to the first chorus, as the music changes from a shuffle to a headbanging charge, is enough to make me forget anything Roxy Music ever told me. Is that what was supposed to happen? The funk-rocker 'Stay' was sprung forth from the forehead of the dancefloor, though, giving Roxy's Siren its own run for the money. This is probably the least impressive track on the record, and the closest thing to a Young Americans-style groove, but there's an impolite noisiness to set it apart from those audial Sominexes.
The last two songs are ballads of a sort, and though I'm generally not as well-disposed towards the pussier songs in the world, I have to admit that these are pretty good considering Bowie's last been able to write a decent ballad...ummm....never. 'Word On A Wing' is more of a light rocker anyway, something about reconciling faith in God or a new girlfriend, or something like that. With Bowie, who cares anyway? He's a robot! All of his feelings are installed via emotion-module downloads from www.microsoft.com/englishpopsinger/pretentious ! The intertwining vocals are impressive, though, and he does a mighty fine job of simulating interest in his work, as he does on the obscure cover 'Wild Is The Wind', though his howling at the end is kinda out of the realm of good taste.
This album isn't, though! Before he got too deep into his brain and his Brian, Bowie had this nice transitional phase in which he created pop music that was, if anything, more influential than the deeper work to come. Station to Station is firmly grounded enough to give all of us folks something to love, from the uncompromising rock to the rubbery funk to the strong ballads...any more album like this and I might've had to take back some of the things I said about Bowie being an incompetent hack.
Capn's Final Word: David transitions again, and makes some of his most convincing music sitting on the fence.
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Nathan Harper
nator9999@comcast.net Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: I used to think Ziggy was Bowie's best album, until I
realized I had much more fun listening to this and Low (well, the first half of
Low anyway). Title track is amazing, incredibly repetive but it never gets old.
I love how it does a complete 180 in the middle too! The best song by a slim
margin though would have to be TVC15. You took the words right from my mouth,
that initial transition in the beginning is awesome. What a weird song. Golden
Years and Stay are both fun, and Wild is the Wind is great too, in a silly,
campy sort of way. This isn't quite A+ material though because I find Word on a
Wing to be extremely cheesey, and I just kind of wish there were more songs.
Sometime in 1976, Bowie relocated his skinny crackheaded ass to West Berlin to further 'artify' himself among the weird, gloomy nihilists that populated that peculiar island of discontent in a sea of Communism, holing himself up with synthesizer pioneer and all-around short bald dude Brian Eno to create a trio of albums that are generally accepted to be among Bowie's best, most heavyweighted artistic statements of all time. Most critic-types approach Bowie with a sort of 'yadda yadda Ziggy Stardust yadda yadda Eno Trilogy yadda yadda', which not only completely dashes over some pretty major successes in the Bowie catalogue (Tonight! Outside! Not these!) but also oversimplifies the Trilogy as a distinct thing. The truth of the matter is that Bowie began screwing with the formula back on Station to Station and didn't completely get off the electro-weirdness bus until after Scary Monsters was finished in 1980 (and I'd go so far as to say the Queen-collaboration 'Under Pressure' was his final 'farethewell' to his Kraut period). Anyway, if you wish, you can view Low as the 'start' of a period of time in which Bowie consciously low-ered his profile (check the cover again) and concentrated on creating introspective, electronically-charged music that had a lot less to do with the pop charts and a lot more to do with what folks like Kraftwerk and Amon Duul II (not to mention Eno and the Eno-version Roxy Music) had been working on for years already...repetition, spacey synth and guitar textures, and 'psycho', depressive lyrics. Of course, Bowie wasn't really weird or ballsy enough to let himself dive into the volcano of avant gardism with both feet, making Bowie's take on this stuff a lot more commercial and, well, Bowie-like than it might otherwise be. Side A of Low, bookmarked with instrumentals, is largely made up of songs that wouldn't have been considered weird if they'd been on Station to Station - faintly disco-ey hard rockers with lots of loud guitar and rhythm section, much more familiarly structured than even the vamp of 'Golden Years' was last time. Hell, riffs, choruses, bridges...these are just rock songs, not the keys to the MX missile silos. The only things at all that would cause someone to look sideways are the textures, because Eno isn't much of a chordin', orchestratin' kinda guy, at least not with his magical synthesizers...and would you be? Why make a $5000 analog synth try to sound like a violin when you can get a violin player to do that (unless you hate string players to death, which pretty bloody well describes me...frigging pretentious, no-tuning bats...except for that one cellist I used to date, of course. She was finer than margaritas by the pool, I tells ya.)? Synthesizers ought to burble like overfed grizzly bears ('What In The World') and sound like water being splattered on a hot frying pan ('Sound and Vision'), or just add layer upon layer of virtual shag carpet over the foundation of the track to make it interesting. Deep. And Eno does precisely what he needs to with his contributions...when a normal distorted guitar just isn’t enough to make the nut bust, he wraps it in flanges and filters and makes it sting. There won't be any surprises for people who've heard the first two Roxy Music albums, or Eno's first three solo records (all of which feature tones and changes which are much more chaotic and risky than the ones he made with Bowie), but if you're graduating from Ziggyland, this album might just blow your fuse...the shift in Bowie's attitude (from decadent and fantastic to expressionist and cynical) would be enough to make a man doubt he's even listening to the same guy.
Without good songs, though, this album would sink faster than you can say 'Phil Manzanera Solo Album', and Bowie and Eno rip off a side of winners, each one memorable and full of energy. The opening instrumental 'Speed of Life', is nothing more than a riff rocker with synthesizers playing a major role (both the musical and otherwise), but it also pounds just as well as 'TVC 15' did, alternating between out-and-out rocking sections and dancey, pensive parts that recall 'Station to Station'. In fact, if you were to distill 'S2S' down to three minutes and remove the vocals, you'd get 'Speed of Life'. 'Breaking Glass' is what I call a 'hop', danceable the poppin' basslbut a bit too pounding to be any good for you, like disco run through a Marshall stack on 11. 'What in the World' is more self-consciously 'boinky', as Bowie stumbles over his own tongue and the rhythms shift near-constantly. This is the first time I feel more of Eno's influence than Bowie's, from the nagging lead guitar line to the carnival synth...parts of this feel a bit too familiar. It's common knowledge that Eno liked to work from a 'vocabulary' of chords and tones when creating his songs, even going so far as to write them up on a chalkboard and point to the next desired chord as the band improved in the studio. (For some reason I remember he particularly loved B-flat major, in case that knowledge is useful to you.) Anyway, this approach tends to make these songs sound Eno-like in more ways than just the synth/guitar effect orgy...there's a certain sameness to chord structure, too. Anyway, I'm also completely in love with the romantic 'Golden Years-y' mid-tempo rocker 'Sound and Vision' (aka 'The Coffee Is Boiling Over Song'), and 'Be My Wife', with it's fleet lead guitars soaring over like rockets, is quite possibly the best of the bunch. The closing instrumental 'A New Career In a New Town' intends to ease us into Side B with some ambient passages, but is itself very conventional as well, some harmonica, a 2/4 beat, what else could you want out of a post-punk pop track? Some vocals? Well, ta hells witch ya!
The only place Low lets all the entrails hang out, as it were, is on the second side, made up of four synthestic instrumentals that fall somewhere north of Eno's own 'audial furniture', but yet not forceful enough to qualify as, say, Tangerine Dream. The only singing here is either wordless or in an unidentifiable, Eastern bit of Bowiebabbling, meaning despite having titles like 'Warzawa' and 'Weeping Wall', you're on your own to fill in the blanks of what these 'compositions' are really about. They're all somewhat dark and barren, though are so completely ambiguous in emotional effect that it's entirely up to the listener to figure out what they feel. I personally am sort of a sucker for this early Eno ambient stuff (pre-1982, anyway), and can really enjoy a juicy set of shifting tones or randomly accented percussion, but I'm afraid what we have here is a group of tracks that show diminishing returns as the side wears on. 'Warzawa' is gorgeous, by far the most moving and evocative of the four (for me), but 'Art Decade' sounds too familiar (it's quite a bit like a certain part of Eno's Another Green World I cant remember the name of, except less), and 'Subterraneans' is way too long and formless to produce much of an effect - call me a sellout, but Bowie's loungey saxophone is the best part. As a whole, I'd say they're just about as effective as the passage on 'Heroes', except that one feels much shorter and more widely varied, and has less of a diluted effect. Still, when presented with the second side of Low or the entire collected works of Vangelis, I'd pick Low every time.
Capn's Final Word: Half brilliant oddball pop and half decent conventional ambient. Bowie makes his big move.
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Nathan Harper
nator9999@comcast.net Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: It's a tough call...sometimes I like Low more, sometimes
Heroes.
Usually, this one comes out on top. There's nothing as great as 'Heroes' on the
first side, but the pop songs on Low are much more consistent. And 'Always
Crashing' and 'Be My Wife' are almost as good anyway. Now I kind of disagree and
think that the instrumentals on Heroes are more interesting, but they are kind
of gimmicky, which I think was a very good point. So I'll give this one the A+.
Alan
Brooks
kerry_prez@yahoo.com Your Rating: A-
Any Short Comments?: I like 'Speed Of Life' most of all. But after all it IS
probably the most accessible track. On 'Low' Bowie wasn't being a chameleon, he
was being Bowie.
Low with Robert Fripp and a near-robotic level of self-confidence, more or less, 'Heroes' is the second in the Star Wars Missle Defense System Trilogy, and marks little departure from the previous record. I'd say I prefer the first side of Low by a tiny smidge, just because I think the quirky 'Beauty and the Beast' isn't much of an opener when compared to the kick in the throat of 'Speed of Life', and 'Blackout's kinda gross. Hell, otherwise we've got a genuine guitar-Titan man-on-the-silver-mountain intro to the breathless 'Joe the Lion', Bowie doing a very schizoid half tired-businessman half pleading spurned lover delivery on the highly intense, yet restrained 'Sons of the Silent Age', which has some of the most memorable lines of this entire group of albums ('Oh baby baby baby I won't even let you go, all I see is all I know, let's take another way down (sons of sound, oh sons of sound)'. The word here is arrangement - while many of the treatments on Low sounded a little tacked on in places (hey lookit me! I'm using a Moog and a bunch of delays to make this guitar sound like an angry hornet with a headache!), the production here is just as dense but twice as transparent. Part of that might be Robert Fripp's influence, since he'd already worked with Eno on a couple of records and knew all the tricks, therefore feeling less inclined to make the effects stick out quite as strongly (not to mention bringing his own sped-up soloing technique and bag of stompboxes to the table). Instead, more effort is spent making the songs more layered and the changes more severe, often muddling each other up until the 'song' is born out of the resulting mess. The classic example is, of course, the massive title track, probably one of David Bowie's most easily recognizable and artistically resilient songs. Musically, it's a combination of swooshing synths, a pounding piano, an untreated distorted guitar, and a very characteristic, infinitely-sustained guitar that sounds more synthesizer than six-string. It's an Ebow, I tell ya...and the best use of one I've ever heard. Anyway, the real star isn't any particular whoosh, it's David's vocals. As the story goes, this was David's kiss-off to his early-Seventies' excesses, where he disavowed his bisexuality ('I, I will be king, and you, you will be queen') and stood up as a 'real' person, as opposed to the 'plastic' people he'd made himself up as while dressed in the Ziggy or Philly Soul personalities. His hair was a normal human color, for one thing, and he sang 'Little Drummer Bow' on television with Bing Crosby, for another. The song tells a very charged tale of two lovers split apart by the Berlin wall, though it's hard to tell whether it's in life or death ('as the guards...shot over our heads/ we kissed, like nothing could fall'), and it's probably one of the most sincere things Bowie's ever done. It's hard to hear his voice ringing through all those gates and reverbs, hacking through the singing guitars and not feel he really means what he's doing.
The second half is more Fun With Transistors, more 'song-oriented' and overall much less long-winded than on Low, though I hazard to say less emotionally intense, as well. The opening 'V-2 Schneider' (recalling the self-propelled Nazi 'buzzbomb' rocket of the latter stages of the war) is a 'song' like 'New Career in a New Town' was a 'song'...there are very firm footholds to hang yourself on, a very normal 4/4 beat, some chanted 'V-2 Schneider's, and some odd, doo-wop saxophone lines. That doesn't much prepare you for when the bottom drops out, though, and it does with a mighty yawn. The opening set of whoosh noises, 'Sense of Doubt' is as abstract and 'ambient' as anything on the Low album (some distant synth pads and four repetitive piano notes known better as 'didn't I leave the killer's body right here?' in your average cheesy slasher film) though it's much more 'minimalist' and, to me, shallow. 'Moss Garden' is essentially just 'Sense of Doubt' with less oppressive pads but adding a ploinking Japanese koto, all signifying nearly nothing. What am I supposed to feel? 'I want sushi?' These tracks are all too obviously gimmicked and contrived for me. While the tracks on Low told you to 'feel emotion', the songs here seem to implore you to 'feel sensation'. 'Moss Garden' is dreamy and relaxing, 'Neukoln' is headachey and frayed, 'Sense of Doubt' is foreboding. Otherwise I feel like these three are too musically inert - there's too many things that are 'supposed' to make you feel a certain way, yet not enough musicians playing to leave a little room open for interpretation While I bet Fripp plays some 'Flippertronics' ('How many times do I have to tell you to not get the fucking tape recorders wet, you goddamn fishbait!'), he's a nonentity on side B.
Luckily, the second side ends with a marvelous disco song that brushes away the preceding three bits of pretentious nonsense into a cloud of rump-bumping dust. 'Secret Life Of Arabia' sounds like Bowie attempting to figure out what he'd be doing right then if he'd kept on with his Young Americans persona for a few more years than he did. It's silly and dated, but it's also pretty funny if you take it as a tongue-in-cheek (and how could it not be, with the hand-claps and 'Secret! Secret!) poke at his own self-importance. You know, 'Heores' is great, but it's a bit too pretentious, lacking some of the 'well hell, let's give it a try' vibe of Low. It'd be easy to blame it on Robert 'Philosopher-King of All Jerks' Fripp's involvement, but I also think that Bowie was also beginning to believe his own artiness a tad too deeply this time around. He doesn't show it on, say, 'Joe the Lion' (he's too busy ripping the microphone to shreds), but the more perfunctory bit of ambient stuff and tendency towards ugly for ugly's sake ('Blackout', 'Neukoln') show that he's trying to make himself more in-line with the Can's of the world. It's not enough to make me doubt the validity of this record (far from it), but if pressed, I'd definitely take Low every time over 'Heroes'. Whatever...anyone who cares needs both of them today right now anyhow.
Capn's Final Word: A bit mechanical, and the ambient part is a bit of a letdown, but still has an iron grip on fascination.
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Nathan Harper
nator9999@comcast.net Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: The pop songs are less consistent than on Low, but this
does have a lot of things going for it. Sure, the instrumentals don't pack the
emotional punch of the stuff on Low, but I find them much easier to sit through,
because they all sound different. 'Sense of Doubt' really captures the
atmosphere it's title suggests, and 'Neukoln' is my favorite Bowie/Eno ambient
thing out of these two albums...I heard it was orchestrated by Phillip Glass or
something too, but I'm not sure about that. And of course we've also got the
title track, one of Bowie's best songs, as well as 'Beauty and the Beast,' and
'Sons of the Silent Age.' A solid A.
Matthew Byrd
Matthewbyrd@Homail.com Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: I'm a bit suprised by the mixed reviews "Heroes" gets.
I haven't really listened to much of David's catalogue but I have given this one
a Low frequent listens and my conclusion, thus far, is that they are anomalies
in his catalogue, a step above the rest. The title track is an almost
unmatched ballad and the album itself is always interesting. Joe The Lion,
Blackout and Beauty And The Beast are all screams, if not furious rockers.
'V-2 Schnieder' is the standout instrumental that almost but doesn't quite stand
up to it's cousin 'Speed Of Life'. Overall, I say if you only get a few
Bowie albums make it Low, Station To Station or "Heroes", I recommend "Heroes" a
bit above the others.
Mike
Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: Great album. The Schneider on V-2 Schneider is a
reference to Florian from Kraftwerk.
Stage
- RCA 1978
Incomplete
This'll have to wait until I have an hour or two to cuddle up with my turntable and dig on these dull live versions of Low tunes. It's awfully hard to find on CD, and not even my Russian contacts have it for download. Stay tuned.
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The last of the Fritzrockers marks a distinct change from the first two, the most obvious one being that Lodger has no whoosh section on Side B...that's right, nothing fills up ol' Lodger but songz songz songz. Boinky, semi-gay, semi-worldbeat electro-wave pop songs. For those of you out there that weren't big fans of those pesky instrumental sides in the first place, or else felt that they'd gotten staler than year old pork rinds on 'Whores' (me! me! me!), you might feel you could automatically mark up Lodger a few extra points, but I say hold right there, Alan Thicke. This album continues some of the positive aspects of the first two albums (interesting arrangements, tasty lead guitar), but not all of them. The atmosphere's been plumb drained outta this mother like pus from a septic boil, and that's not just the fault of not having those ambiguous little bugbears on side B. See, if you remove atmosphere from the equation, you have to replace it with melody or else you leave a vacuums. And v
