Don’t count David Bowie out quite yet. The guy’s a chameleon who sticks around, one way or another.
Bowie did suffer a heart attack more than 10 years ago, but he’s not your average rock star or musician.
He’s been many things: folkie, performance artist, mime, glam queen, space man, future shock refugee, coked-out soul brother, Thin White Duke, artist-in-exile and plain, old mega star. Through it all he evolves equally as a music making artist and rock and roll hero.
He has hits, but they’re incidental, and iconic. He creates music outside of the mainstream while hovering over it, and his image and work are prone to speculation. Bowie’s independence of conformity keeps him easily relevant and worth listening to.
The Next Day is worth the long wait. The recording, which features Bowie stalwarts Tony Visconti, Gail Ann Dorsey, Gerry Leonard, Earl Slick, and Sterling Campbell among others, is alternately edgy, reflective, spacey and dark.
There’s no easy single here and the one first released, Where Are We Now, won’t grab attention easily. It’s an almost traditional take on the passage of time and aging but its attraction is its mood and honesty.
The music is stately and Bowie’s voice, always a singular sound of rock, is deepened and slightly husky. He still hits the higher registers when needed, as in Valentine’s Day, a character driven narrative that recalls his Alladin Sane themes. It’s not an obvious subject to decipher, given the Jack Kerouac-like script on the inner sleeve, but the song appears to be about a high school shooting set to a melodic pattern that’s one of the more tuneful tracks here.
If there’s a thread running through this album, then its abstract and stirring sounds are deeply connected to his Berlin Trilogy era. It’s not a surprise, given the album picture (a blanked out Heroes cover) and the fertile creative period that spawned those sympathetic recordings (Low, Lodger and Heroes).
Although The Next Day is less experimental than some of those recordings, there’s the same skyward looking gaze that informs the music. There’s grit in the lyrics, picturesque though they often are.
I’d Rather Be High sets a sweet extraterrestrial hook and bouncing beat to a tale about a burned-out soldier, who’s sick of combat (“Nabokov is sun-licked now/Upon the beach at Grunewald/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.”)
The swirling pulse of much of the material also shares a link to Bowie’s Scary Monsters period. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) has the yearning and futuristic thread that flows through many of his songs and subjects. Likewise for Dancing Out In Space, which brings the ether down to a foot stomping chorus.
Bowie has always been adept at mixing a hard riff into quasi-anthemic proportions; done here on (You Will) Set the World on Fire – an unexpected name checker set in New York.
Bowie’s strength on The Next Day is reflecting his own past into the future (again), getting his sound and vision from the cities and the skies.
— Dean Gordon-Smith is a Vernon-based musician and freelance writer, who reviews music in his column, Street Sounds, every Friday in The Morning Star.
