Change is inevitable, and time continues to march on relentlessly no matter what human beings try to do to compartmentalize or dupe it. No modern musician’s represented that axiom with more drama (and killer hooks) over the years than David Bowie.
For a long time, Bowie served as the ultimate Rock Star Changeling, a larger-than-life figure whose elegant androgyny and readiness to embrace and shed musical personae on a dime impacted music and popular culture like no other musician before or since. His unprecedented brilliance at re-sculpting his image to suit his own whims provided a template for every artist who’s followed suit: Junior-varsity image shifters like Madonna and Lady Gaga, to name just two, are really only aping the kinds of transformations Bowie perfected decades ago. And his restless sonic hopscotching between glam rock, blue-eyed soul, gothic cabaret, experimental electronica, and post-punk dance music throughout the 1970s helped push all of those genres into the mainstream.
The titanic weight of that self-built mythology almost backfired on Bowie in the 1980s and ’90s, when the man whose one-or-two-album tangents once inspired lesser bands’ entire careers began chasing trends instead of setting them. But a funny thing happened around the beginning of the 21st century. Rock’s Cracked Actor began peeling away his facade, shucking sonic flavors of the month, and looking inward for the first time.
He faced the spectre of 911 and his own advancing years on 2001’s haunting Heathen, and 2003’s solid Reality continued the winning streak. Then a near-fatal heart episode cut short David Bowie’s last world tour in 2004, and for nearly a decade he pretty much vanished from public view. Rumors placed him at everything from retirement to self-imposed exile to death’s door. None of the above, fortunately, proved correct.
The Next Day, David Bowie’s newest long-player, dropped last week — with surprisingly little fanfare, given its creator. The record’s gestation was kept a tightly-guarded secret until two months ago, and its packaging (basically the cover of Bowie’s “Heroes” LP, defaced) thumbed its nose at the legend surrounding its maker. Whether that apparent insouciance was spurred by don’t-give-a-damn subversion or by the man’s well-known penchant for theatrical calculation is irrelevant. The end product’s the most exhilarating record that Bowie’s put his name to in God knows how long.
It’s also the most quintessentially David-Bowie-sounding record Bowie’s put his name to in God knows how long. Sonically, it sounds most like a continuation of the singer’s Berlin years, with melodies largely insinuating themselves from beneath a discomfiting wall of vaguely foreboding atmospherics. If anyone’s entitled to plunder his own past for inspiration, Bowie is, and he does so masterfully here: The record’s title track sports skronking electric guitars that recall “Heroes’” “Beauty and the Beast,” and the grunting saxes on the sublimely decadent “Dirty Boys” could’ve easily slunk in from Station to Station or Diamond Dogs. The familiar martial drum pattern of the Ziggy Stardust chestnut “Five Years” even closes out “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die.”
What keeps The Next Day from sounding like simple pastiche or wheel-spinning is the production (rendered with muscular economy by Tony Visconti, who also produced “Heroes,” Scary Monsters, and plenty of other essential Bowie recordings), and most especially the songwriting.
Only a 66-year old man who’s heard the reaper’s scythe whistling directly over his head could deliver a ballad as poignant as “Where Are We Now,” which Bowie sings in an unadorned, disarmingly fragile croon. Indeed, mortality and the persistence of memory hover over much of The Next Day, yet it seldom feels like a bummer: The record’s been crafted with energy and focus to match its depth, and that engagement (plus a game band populated by equal parts old Bowie pals and young bucks) can’t help but inspire.
The lyrics often cut with lacerating efficacy even as the melodies soar. The Beatles-y jauntiness of “Valentine’s Day” almost becomes lulling, until you realize that Bowie’s sweetly singing it from the point of view of a school shooter. And on the brilliant “I’d Rather Be High,” Gerry Leonard’s guitars ping with psychedelic headiness while the song’s soldier narrator wishes he were somewhere else (“I’d rather be dead / or out of my head / than training these guns / on the men in the sand”).
The Next Day officially closes with “Heat,” an eerily beautiful dirge that, in its own obtuse way, feels like one of Bowie’s most revealing songs. “I tell myself I don’t know who I am,” he intones — a proclamation that’s a far cry from the bravado-filled androgyne who conquered the world forty-some years ago. A few seconds further in, an acoustic guitar strums purposefully in front of a sighing violin and artfully-filigreed feedback while Bowie sings, “I am a seer / and I am a liar.” It’s the sound of rock’s most elegant changeling simultaneously acknowledging and tearing down his own myth, pulling the feather boa from around his neck, wiping away the lipstick, and peeling the painted glitter from himself and his music.
Fans should definitely spring for the Deluxe Edition, which includes three non-essential (but pretty damned pleasing) bonus cuts. “So She,” an unerringly gorgeous trifle of a ballad, stands as the rough gem of the bunch. At just over two-and-a-half minutes, it feels maddeningly unfinished, but Bowie’s alien croon (and a sparkling keyboard melody) render it irresistible. It’s perfect for swaying under a painted moon, and a welcome breath of winsome romance after the brilliant but harrowing journey that precedes it.
