Review - Bowie

David Bowie
Blackstar

Something happened on the day he died
- David Bowie, "Blackstar"

Faced with death - whether from old age or a potentially fatal illness - most musicians withdraw a little and make stripped-down, solemn records where they play the acoustic guitar and sing about the transience of life. Johnny Cash did it with his American series, Leonard Cohen's been doing it for about twenty years, and one might have expected the recently deceased David Bowie to do something similar. But if there's one thing you could say with certainty about Bowie, it's that he never did what the world expected. More than anyone else, except perhaps his friend and contemporary Lou Reed, David Bowie made a point of never making the same record twice, always moving forward, creating the trend rather than trying to fit in with it, and he continued that approach on his final album, Blackstar.

It's taken me a long time to write this review, because Blackstar is the kind of album you have to listen to more than once to really appreciate it. This isn't the Bowie of "Starman" and "Rebel Rebel". Instead, the songs on Blackstar are closer to the more experimental Station to Station. The music is a collection of sounds, more about feeling than melody, while the lyrics are dense, obscure, impressionistic. Even on "Dollar Days", the album's most direct song, the lyrics are more allusive than descriptive. But even though Station to Station and Bowie's previous album The Next Day offer good starting points for a description of the sounds to be found on Blackstar, the fact remains that this represents new ground for Bowie. Unlike any of Bowie's previous works, Blackstar has the feeling of a jazz album - the way the sounds fit together is reminiscent of Bitches Brew more than anything else - while the lyrics show more of the influence of Bowie's hero Scott Walker. Sadly, we'll never know what Bowie would have gone on to do had he lived, but Blackstar gives the impression of an artist about to embark on a new phase in his career.

What Blackstar proves above all else is that, even approaching seventy and fighting a losing battle with cancer, David Bowie was at the height of his powers as an artist, and the body of work he left us with is something few artists can compete with.

Rating: 10/10