Album Reviews

David Bowie fans who lost the thread around his Tin Machine days or who meandered mystified or perhaps less than fully satisfied through his end of century output and beyond need to return for The Next Day his first album in a decade, following his 2004 heart attack and major surgery. Not that Heathens wasn’t a good outing or that some of the others didn’t have their great moments.

As if to erase years of creative clutter and to just plain shock, The Next Day’s artwork reprises the triumphant Heroes cover with “Heroes” “Sharpie”’d over and the iconic robotic cover photo pasted over with a large square Post-it note in which is written “The Next Day.”

Two things to keep in mind: Heroes may have arrived to critical acclaim, but it was a difficult record that was well ahead of the public and not happily received by the stodgy RCA, his record label at the time. And its worth remembering that Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), his last for that label, was among his best. This new one produced by long time studio partner Tony Visconti (who produced Man of Words/Man of Music (later known as Space Oddity) and The Man Who Sold The World as well as the aforementioned Heroes among others, returns to the hard edged, tearing sound of Heroes (side 1) but more particularly the even more jarring and woefully underappreciated The Lodger. But this new, guitar shard saturated album is anything but an exercise in nostalgia.

While Bowie has previously expressed an interest in morbidity—he covered in concert Jacques Brel’s melodramatic “My Death” during his Ziggy Stardust touring days—here at age 66 and after a genuine brush with his finale, he confronts it head on with a series of songs about death and violence, shootings and suicides, war and no peace.

The first single, the resigned, almost bemused “Where Are We Now”, sprung last January via the Internet upon his unsuspecting pleased and relieved world-wide fan base sets the album’s overall mood, though the tone is far more varied within its sprawling sixty minutes.

The title tune opener is a nervous, resigned “Beauty and the Beast”-like chase of impending decrepitude and decay (“Here I am, not quite died, my body left to rot in a hollow tree”). The song spills out life’s cruel arc (“first they give you everything that you want, then they take back everything that you have”). It’s the perfect song to accompany a terminal cancer diagnosis.

The slinky/nasty “Dirty Boys” (“When the die is cast and you have no choice we will run with the dirty boys”) is prime Bowie, though in and out in fewer than three minutes is newfound economy. The lyrical urgency seems to have come from a much younger man.

The vampirish “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” puts the Bowie-celebrity in your shoes, exploring our and his complicated love/hate parasitic relationship with stars and stardom (“they watch us from behind their shades…from behind their tinted window stretch.”) Bowie names names: “Birgitte and Jack and Kate and Brad”.

Even the dead ones remain active in this relationship “soaking up our primitive world.” “We will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever” Bowie exclaims.

Three songs in this album has already packed an overwhelming lyrical and musical energy jolt and a sense of thematic purpose and focus Bowie hasn’t managed in a decade, even as his previous albums have had their moments among the meandering.

“Love Is Lost” comes next and it doesn’t relent. The loss begets “the darkest hour and you’re 22” and an attempt at a fresh beginning: “your country’s new your friends are too, your house and even your eyes are new, but your fear is as old as the world”.

Then, after four agitated songs Bowie serves up the gorgeous “Where Are We Now”—a reminiscence only an older man could have written and one that will resonate most richly with older listeners but with younger ones too. The Bowie/Visconti team can still bring the chills.

As far as this Bowie fan is concerned he’s already gotten his money’s worth and he’s only about eighteen minutes into the hour!

After a second slower wistful tune, “Valentine’s Day,” one of the set’s melodic highlights, though it's about a grizzly school shooting ("Valentine told me who's to go/Feelings he's treasured most of all/The teachers and the football star/It's in his tiny face/It's in his scrawny hand," it’s back to the linear nervous energy of “If You Can See Me” filled with the kind of brutal, mythical imagery found on Bowie’s earliest albums. “I will take your lands and all that lays beneath/The dust of cold flowers/drizzle of dark ashes/I will slaughter your kind/descend from belief/I am the spirit of greed, of gold, of theft/Burn all your books and the problems they make/If you can see me I can see you.

“I’d Rather Be High” is an anti-war song that equals or surpasses Elvis Costello’s “Ship Building”. E.C. pleaded a tragic case from the viewpoint of an adult outsider. Bowie’s is from the point of view of the youngster being sent to the front: “I’d rather be high/I’d rather be flying/I’d rather be dead/Or out of my head/Than training these guns on those men in the sand/I’d rather be high.”

Skipping a few tunes—none of which are filler—you get to the spit at death “How Does the Grass Grow?” another song with a war theme—cold war this time— with references to Hungarian skirts and Eastern bloc motorbikes popular in the early ‘60s, that reminisces about a couple’s long ago cemetery rendezvous (“would you still love me if the clocks could go backwards?”) juxtaposed with the sacrifices of the dead. It’s a rock’n’roll suicide.

Bowie sings “Remember the dead, they were so great!....some of them”. Such a twisted, mocking line deserves a musical rejoinder so Bowie and a chorus break into a “ya ya ya ya” rendition of the memorable riff from The Shadows’ 1960 instrumental hit “Apache” complete with falsetto echo.

The answer to the song title’s question is “blood, blood, blood.” And where do the boys lie? “Mud, mud, mud.”

The morbid tale fades and the song ends with bravado as Bowie sings “I gaze in defeat at the stars in the night, the light in my life burns away. There will be no tomorrow when you sigh in your sleep and meaning returns with the day.”

“You Feel So Lonely” has a “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” 1950’s ballad-like vibe with an ending that reprises the drum coda on Ziggy’s “Five Years”. When it hits after fifty plus minutes of turmoil and drifts into the fade-out ether you’ll feel more than satisfied, but “Heat” the album’s creepy Scott Walker-ish denouement will deliver you to higher plane. Bowie confesses in character “I am a seer but I am a liar.” This bit of self-doubt has crept into his work throughout his career.

The production and sound you ask? Well Bowie and Visconti didn’t produce this epic on the cheap and their sonic bona fides cannot be questioned. The musical cast was large and impressive and includes many familiar names along with some that aren’t—at least to me. Tony Levin and guitarist Earl Slick, who’s teamed up with Bowie numerous times are on board.

Bowie’s albums have almost all featured memorable sound—particularly the earlier and mid-period ones.

The overall sound and particularly the mix are very good, particularly in this era of mushy sonic drek, but I was disappointed in the soft, lifeless Pro Tools drum sound. Cymbals lack any kind of sizzle, the snare and kick are soft. Compare this to Scary Monsters… for instance.

But listen the days of mounting a production like this to analog tape are pretty much over and after hearing Visconti recounting the making of Heroes at one of Colleen Murphy’s “Classic Album Sundays” events that were part of last Spring’s Red Bull Music Festival, I would bet Tony is never going back.

That out of the way, let’s just say the sound is pretty damn good by modern standards and the mix and production are stellar. There’s a lot to dig into and the recording’s overall clarity and reverberant warmth invite you in.

I first downloaded from HDTracks the 48K/24 bit file said to be the master’s resolution and found the overall sound to be reasonably dynamic and transparent. After about a dozen plays the double 180g gatefold LP arrived mastered at Masterdisk from the original master file, perhaps first transferred to analog tape (still checking on that). For whatever reason or reasons the vinyl sounds way better than the digital file converted via my very good D/A converter. The sound is more spacious and definitely more dynamic.

The gatefold packaging is not an afterthought. It includes bespoke labels for the four sides as well as heavy stock color inner sleeves. And you get the CD thrown in containing three bonus tracks that are bonus tracks because they are not up the uniformly memorable fourteen album tracks.

Highly recommended to all but especially Bowie fans who have lost their way.