Bowie Revisited: Earthling

David Bowie toured his 'Outside' album with co-headliner Nine Inch Nails throughout 1995.  He must have liked what he heard from his band, for immediately following the tour, Reeves Gabrels (guitar), Gail Ann Dorsey (bass), Zach Alford (drums), and Mike Garson (piano) were pulled into the studio to harness the road energy into the recording of an album.  The work produced during these sessions formed the tightest group of songs on any Bowie collection in the previous 20 years.  Yes, there is some experimentation with the club sounds of the time - but this is not the 'jungle' album that its reputation would lead you to believe - this is first and foremost a rock album, and rock it does!  Hard!

Opener 'Little Wonder' is a revelation - almost non-sensical lyrics, in the 'cut-up' style (purportedly written about the 7 Dwarves, with a couple of new ones - Stinky, etc. - thrown in for good measure) lend a playfulness not heard since, what?, 'Kooks?'  And this over a pounding Garson piano driving the listener toward the drum & bass explosion in the middle of the song (perhaps the most exhilarating 75 seconds of any Bowie recording).  'Looking For Satellites' with its whirling carnival back beat and Lennon sound-alike vocals contains one of the greatest guitar solos in DB's catalog.  'Battle For Britain (The Letter)', with its warring elements: classic piano solo, stuttering, machine gun fire effect, soft whirring drill noise, adding up to a fantastic whole.

The album is kept to a trim 9 songs - a wise choice as each is at least very good, making for a fairly consistent listening experience. It's difficult to pick out key tracks, as they're all so good from the hushed pulse, honking, sleazy sax & hard rock workout of 'Seven Years in Tibet,' to the fun, yet strangely aggressive swipe at his adopted land in 'I'm Afraid of Americans.'  The only negative is choice of closer: 'Law (Earthlings on Fire),' with its rapid fire chant, is the weakest track on the album, but barely so and is still better than many a track on recent efforts.
 
The trajectory of experimentation with rock mixed with contemporary club trends, begun with 1993's 'Black Tie White Noise' finds fruition with 'Earthling.' It is a very satisfying collection, and in a way closes the book on one phase of Bowie's career.  On his next project, he would move away from albums like 'Outside' and 'Earthling' at a complete right angle, both stylistically, and in terms of songwriting.  True to form, however, the unexpected is to be expected from an artist like David Bowie, right?

Bowie Revisited: Outside

And then there's Outside.  Unlike Bowie's previous 2 albums, there was some anticipation before Outside's release among more than just the die hard fans.  Sometime in 1994, an announcement was made that Bowie would be reuniting with Brian Eno for a new album - the two had last worked together on Bowie's 1979 recording, 'Lodger.'  Bowie's return to solo recording with 1993's 'Black Tie White Noise', showed a renewed commitment to making interesting music, the same year's 'The Buddha of Suburbia' upped the ante a bit, as it was DB's most personally experimental work in more than a decade.  Working with Eno meant that Bowie was ready to make some downright dangerous music.

Though 1974's 'Diamond Dogs' was originally conceived as a concept album and  there was certainly some underlying conceptual framework to many of Bowie's successive records, 'Outside' was designed, from the writing, recording, packaging, etc. with full-blown capital 'C' concepts in mind.  'Outside's' 2 most consuming preoccupations are Millennial Anxiety, and of all things, art-murder.  Bowie and Eno, along with a mixed cast of musicians and sidemen from Bowie's professional past, including Tin Machine's Reeves Gabrels, Erdal Kizilcay (he and Bowie recorded virtually all of 'The Buddha of Suburbia' by themselves), Mike Garson, who had been playing with Bowie off and on since 'Aladdin Sane,' and Carlos Alomar, who'd played rhythm guitar on just about every album since 1975's 'Young Americans,' came up with characters, recording strategies (Eno's 'Oblique Strategies' cards were in studio, Burroughs' 'cut-up' method was put to use in the lyric writing), and a mind-blowing amount of music (the lengthy 70+ minute album was apparently whittled down form hundreds of hours of material). 

The music on this album is dark, paranoid, and wildly ambitious.  Interspersed between proper songs are 'segues'  with Bowie, voice manipulated to sound like among other things, a young girl/murder victim, a lonely octogenarian, and The Minotaur (?), vaguely outlining a story of brutal murder as performance art.

'Leon Takes Us Outside' phases in with its odd noises and spoken dates, setting the paranoiac mood, then morphs into the stormy title track.  'The Hearts Filthy Lesson' follows - this song was a single release just prior to the album, and was a strange, dark statement of the new direction Bowie was prepared to take his audience.  With its violent chug, dark & dense lyrics and icy piano - it is a fantastic piece of music!  'A Small Plot of Land' finds Bowie channeling hero Scott Walker over a frightening jazz number.  The first 'segue' is next -  DB as scared little girl, recording what may be her last words, before the track explodes into the excellent industrio-clash of 'Hallo Spaceboy.'

 

There are many fine songs on this disc: the robo-funk of 'I Have Not Been to Oxford Town;' the morose 'Wishful Beginnings' (which makes the depressing 'Heroes'-era instrumental 'Sense of Doubt' sound like 'Modern Love'); 'We Prick You' and 'I'm Deranged' (one of his absolute best vocal performances) point the way toward the drum & bass sound DB would explore further with his next project.  'Thru These Architects Eyes' is a great stomping rocker, and the closer, 'Strangers When We Meet,' though stylistically a little incongruous, is a superb song on par with many of his epic ballads of the 'Heroes,' or 'Absolute Beginners' variety.

This album garnered generally favorable reviews, and as stated above, arrived with some anticipation - but it sank like a stone.  This is not surprising, given the challenging, dark subject matter and the difficult listening experience 'Outside' can sometimes be -  'Let's Dance' this ain't. 'Outside' can reward repeated listens, though as with any work of this length, there are bound to be some ups and downs. Despite this unevenness, the sheer number of excellent songs here is equal to those on his previous 2 albums combined.  

This is overall, a thrilling piece of work.

Bowie Revisited: The Buddha of Suburbia

Cover to the original 1993 release

David Bowie's 2nd album release of 1993 was 'The Buddha of Suburbia.'  This collection  remains one of the most mysterious in the oeuvre - one key reason for this has been the complete silence on the subject from the man himself.  Apart from one single release, there was no promotion for the album - no talk shows, no tour - in fact, none of the songs on this album have been performed live on any tour.  The music of 'The Buddha of Suburbia (BoS)' is left to speak for itself - unfortunately for this album, 20 years after its release it is still difficult to grasp what exactly the music is trying to say.  'BoS' is a dense (lyrically, its impenetrable), sometimes dreary, and often dull work.  It does, however, contains moments of excellence, and it truly is one of DB's most experimental works.*

'BoS' began life as pieces of music DB contributed to a BBC TV show of the same name, but he must have felt there was enough there to pull longtime collaborators Erdal Kizilcay (multi-instrumentalist) and David Richards (co-producer/mixer) into the studio to flesh the soundtrack pieces into full-fledged songs.  The results were something of a mixed bag.

The title track (released as the lone single, to deaf ears) gets things started and is the 1st of what I'd consider to be 3 standout tracks. Sung by the artist at his Cockney-est, the song is a backward-looking piece, which for good measure and before send off, quotes the chords to 'Space Oddity,' and lyrics to 'All the Madmen.'  The pulsing dance beat and distorted vocals of 'Sex and the Church' is followed by the jazz-no-wait-it's-trip-hop of 2nd standout 'South Horizon.'

The dirge 'The Mysteries' is sorrowfully pretty, but is about 3 minutes too long.  A couple of shockingly 'conventional' songs follow: the stoccato rock/rap of 'Bleed Like a Craze, Dad,' 'Strangers When We Meet,' which would be given a fuller sound when it was re-recorded for 1995's 'Outside,' & the shimmering 'Dead Against It.'  Don't ask what it's about, but the dreamy stand-out 'Untitled No.1' has got a gorgeous melody.

Cover to the 1995 re-issue

The album wraps up with the instrumental 'Ian Fish, U.K. Heir,' a gently plucked guitar describing the melody of the title track, over a mild drone.  This piece isn't a million miles away from something you might find on side 2 of 'Heroes,' and is followed by a completely superfluous re-tread of the title song, with an even more superfluous Lenny Kravitz guitar solo bolted onto the end.

The best moments on this disc rival anything Bowie has released over the last 20 years, but as a top to bottom listening experience, 'The Buddha of Suburbia' functions best in context as link between the bright creative re-emergence of 'Black Tie White Noise' and the dark, paranoid, wild experimentalism of his next project.

*when using the word 'experimental' in reference to DB's work from as far back as the early 1980s, it should be read 'personally experimental,' as in: trying methods, sounds or styles of which he has not previously made much use.  Long gone were the days when a Bowie album helped spawn a movement, be it glam, punk, New Romanticism, etc.  His work then wasn't as 'experimental', as what I'd call 'inventive.' His later works' schizophrenic genre-hopping and dabblings in garage-rock, dance, jazz, etc., while not cutting edge, were nonetheless daring experiments by an unsatisfied artist searching for alternate methods of creative expression.

Bowie Review: Black Tie White Noise

Love David Bowie! In anticipation of his latest release I wanted to take a look back at the last 20 years of Bowie albums (8 in number, including next week’s ‘The Next Day’).  First up, Black Tie White Noise, the first of 2 albums Bowie released in 1993.  BTWN marked the beginning of what was something of a creative renaissance in DB’s career as a solo artist. 
 
Coming off of a couple of uninspired mid-80s bombs (‘Tonight’ and ‘Never Let Me Down’) and the Tin Machine experiment (2 albums closing out the 80s, where DB was relegated to just band member, along with noise-guitarist extraordinary, Reeves Gabrels, and a couple of Soupy Sales’ kids), BTWN was a reassertion of DB’s reputation as a relevant artist and bona fide mover of discs - for a number of reasons it didn’t quite work out that way, but there is still a hell a lot on this album that’s worthwhile. This recording begins a string of albums that helped rehabilitate the career of an artist with maybe a little something to prove.
 
BTWN reunited Bowie with co-producer Nile Rodgers, who worked with DB on the excellent and super commercial ‘Let’s Dance’ - and this work comes across as Let’s Dance’s eccentric older cousin.  It’s horn heavy, dance-able & strange and the songs (at least the originals, there are a handful of covers that are successful to varying degrees) beat up just about anything in Bowie’s output the previous decade. DB’s involvement as musician/producer on this record is greater than on any since the end of his ‘classic’ period (ending with 1980’s Scary Monsters).  He contributes not only most of the songs (with solo writing credits), but guitar work and some pretty fine sax solos on the majority of tracks.
 
This record has been seen by some as a love letter to then-new bride Iman, and this idea is certainly backed up by the opening and closing tracks, ‘The Wedding’ and ‘The Wedding Song’ [same song, really, the former an instrumental, the latter with lyrics (in a typically-Bowie self-referencing way, this recalls a similar arrangement between the opening and closing numbers ‘Scary Monsters,’ It’s No Game pt.’s 1 & 2)].  ‘The Wedding’ is a fantastic opener, and right away establishes an important sonic element to the entire album: The Groove.
A minor sin: the sequencing slips a bit with the next couple of tracks, a re-recorded Tin Machine hold over, ‘You’ve Been Around’, a groove-y but otherwise unremarkable cover of Cream’s ‘I Feel Free’ and the LA race riots-inspired title track, but what follows is extraordinary stuff. 
 
The sequence beginning with ‘Jump They Say’ (possibly the greatest forgotten single of DB’s  - see above video), and progressing through an excellent cover of Scott Walker’s ‘Nite Flites,’ the pulsing, chanting club dub of ‘Pallas Athena’ through the playful chirp of single ‘Miracle Goodnight’ (I dare you not to hum this song for the rest of the day after hearing it) - I’d put this four song sequence up against any in his catalog and it would hold its own - seriously!
 
The last third of the album consists of the pretty ‘Don’t Let Me Down and Down’ (honestly, this album may include the highest concentration of straight up love songs - and there’s 2 - in DB’s catalog) and the lounge-dance of ‘Looking For Lester’ featuring a call and response duet between the great trumpet work of Lester Bowie and David’s own saxophone - nothing quite like it in the oeuvre. A schmaltzy cover of Morrissey’s ‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’ follows and the album closes with the aforementioned ‘Wedding Song’ - a gorgeous ballad that puts a heart-shaped exclamation point on what is, though perhaps a tad dated, still a fine, fine album with a few songs that I feel are among his best. 
 
There would be even better material in the not so distant future, but this was a great start to a new decade, which saw more and more artists coming out of the woodwork, acknowledging Bowie’s influence and hailing their hero’s return to inspired music-making.