David Bowie / The Next Day

Filed in David Bowie,

Album Reviews | Released on Columbia
| By Stuart Gadd

David Bowie
The Next Day
(Columbia)
****
Now that the dust has settled a little, what to make of the puzzling epigram that is David Bowie’s The Next Day? To begin with, megastars eh? Jagger, the lot of them, don’t give a shit about what you and I want. Are inconsiderate enough to carry on doing just exactly what they want when, with our expertise of being ever so slightly psychotically into their music, we’re telling them, your muse was over there mate, at the Hammersmith Apollo in ’72. I was at the front.

Well David Bowie seems like his own focus group to the power of a Roman legion. Nearly one week on ( and after a first listen which made me think it was ugly shiftwork rock) The Next Day is pretty fantastic.

And it’s pretty amazing, with all his long history, that Bowie can still collect noises that sound new, strange and slightly alien to conjure a musical universe. The parping saxes and squelchy enigmatic funk of ‘Dirty Boys’, where scrawling, nervous breakdown guitars a la Scary Monsters peel to reveal a satisfying melodic core. The way that the pretty, tuneful, classic Bowie pop of ‘The Stars Are Out Tonight’ is suddenly augmented by handclaps, right on cue from ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ and from the ’80’s. And what sounds like the ping of a triangle. The monochrome minimalism of ‘Love Is Lost’ is then suddenly up against the slam dunk of a chorus swell which reveals the puzzling lyric ” say goodbye to the life without pain / Say hello, you’re a beautiful girl”. Everything has its consolations.

This is the very transformative, Bowie still clearly enjoying the moment of casting off routine with a great phrase or odd gesture. And he’s still deliciously hammy on the classy Middle Eastern psych pop of ‘I’d Rather Be High’. After the jazzy understated chorus key shift ( very 80’s Bowie, except done well) there’s a great moment where he adds a leering Lydonesque “yeah” to the brattish line ” I’d rather smoke and phone my ex, be bleeding for some teenage sex”.

If a great record is a collection of moments which add up, this is great. ‘I’d Rather Be High’ is written from the perspective of a young sniper who hates what he does – in a sense also, on The Next Day Bowie seems to have the world in his sights from a military implacenent. As with ‘Fame’, his co write with John Lennon from Young Americans, The Next Day is about the crazy things being famous can make you do and think. Such as seemingly imagining yourself as a Roman emperor on the muscular flexing of opener ‘The Next Day’, ” First they give you everything that you want, then they take back everything that you have” , Bowie yells maniacally here, with the line also” here I am, not quite dying / My body left to rot in a hollow tree”. With a lyric elsewhere also ” I can see your corpse hanging from a beam” perhaps we are meant to think of the fascist dictator Mussolini and his whore hanging from a telegraph pole above the crowd.

The closing ‘Heat’ is stunning, a slow theatrical unfurling of Spanish guitar and soaring violin over a machine like ambience which grows like ‘Warszawa’ relocated to Scott Walker’s epic back catalogue. With added Jaco Pastorius like jazzy bass from Gail Ann Dorsey, Bowie’s vocal has a mastery of tone. As he trills ” and then I tell myself, I don’t know who I am” you’re right in the forlorn echoing landscape with him.

History should be left to judge the relative merits of The Next Day as opposed to Scary Monsters, Lodger or any other Bowie record – this is a record you can just go with right now. As Bowie, no doubt without trying, has found a way of navigating his psycho fans moodswings and pleasing many.