Albums : David Bowie : The Next Day

Albums : David Bowie : The Next Day

Listen To David Bowie : The Next Day

Who David Bowie?
In the early morning hours of Tuesday the 8th January, Iso/Columbia Records released a new single by David Bowie titled 'Where Are We Now?' exclusively launching in the iTunes Store in 119 countries. David Bowie's first new album in ten years and his 30th studio recording, THE NEXT DAY is also available as a pre-order on iTunes with a wide release scheduled for March. January the 8th is of course David Bowie's birthday, a timely moment for such a treasure to appear as if out of nowhere.

Throwing shadows and avoiding the industry treadmill is very David Bowie despite his extraordinary track record that includes album sales in excess of 130 million not to mention his massive contributions in the area of art, fashion, style, sexual exploration and social commentary. It goes without saying that he has sold out stadiums and broken ticket records throughout the world during this most influential of careers.

In recent years radio silence has been broken only by endless speculation, rumor and wishful thinking ....a new record...who would have ever thought it, who'd have ever dreamed it! After all David is the kind of artist who writes and performs what he wants when he wants...when he has something to say as opposed to something to sell. Today he definitely has something to say.

Produced by long term collaborator Tony Visconti, 'Where Are We Now?' was written by Bowie, and was recorded in New York. The single is accompanied by a haunting video directed by Tony Oursler which harks back to David's time in Berlin. He is seen looking in on footage of the auto repair shop beneath the apartment he lived in along with stark images of the city at the time and a lyric constantly raising the question Where Are We Now?

"The moment you know, you know you know" resonates from the new single's lyric. Now we all know...David Bowie has been in the recording studio...just when we least expected it!!

The Next Day Review
Earlier this year, someone in a position seemingly to know told me that David Bowie was on his deathbed, suffering from inoperable brain cancer. I passed this news on to a fellow Bowie fan, a friend with his ear to the ground in the music industry, who e-mailed back, “I’ve heard that too. I’ve also heard he’s A) dying from some mysterious virus; B) been incapacitated by a stroke; C) recovering from a near-fatal Catskills motorcycle accident. Probably not that last one, but who knows?”

A career spent courting otherworldliness, followed by a decade out of the public eye (and a 2004 heart attack), does tend to fuel morbid rumors. Fortunately, Bowie, at the age of 66, is perfectly healthy—or at least healthy enough to work, as only two days after I was assured he was drawing his last breath, his label announced he’d soon debut his first album of new songs in 10 years. The Next Day finally arrives this week, after a couple of videos and a pre-release stream on iTunes, and it’s quite good, too, although you should be wary of critics—even trustworthy me!—hailing twilight albums by classic-rock acts as “his best since Blood on the Tracks . . . or Band on the Run . . . or Graceland.” One so wants one’s heroes to stick a final landing before the lights dim that it, perhaps, colors one’s judgment. So I won’t say this is Bowie’s best album since 1980’s Scary Monsters, which wouldn’t be true anyway, since his two most recent albums, 2002’s Heathen and 2003’s Reality, were also quite good. He’s been on a roll of late, albeit a slow one.

The trick for aging rock and pop stars is knowing when to stop chasing chart hits, when to relinquish a seat at the “cool kids” table and settle into making the best, most honest music one can. Bob Dylan righted his career in the early 90s with two albums of traditional songs and has since taken on grizzly old-timer status, writing and performing in a timeless, pan-roots style that encompasses folk, blues, R&B, early rock, and country. At the opposite end of the Boomer spectrum, every new Rolling Stones album sounds like a mid-life crisis with the inevitable two or three stabs at a rewriting of “Start Me Up” (the priapism of which already felt canned back in 1981 when the song was released—and the band’s members were merely creeping up on 40).

Bowie spent much of the 1980s and 90s groping after the cutting edge. Of course, that was how he made his name in the 70s, too, borrowing shiny new sounds left and right with knowing panache. But where he used to run just ahead of the curve—pop’s sweet spot, as Madonna will also tell you—he lost a step or two as he aged. Nothing wrong with that; it happens to everyone sooner or later. Bowie’s renaissance began at the dawn of the century when he reunited with Tony Visconti, his producer on many of his best 70s albums, and started making records that extended the dark, disjointed sound of great late-70s works such as “Heroes” and Lodger; for Bowie, this is what counts as roots music. He’ll never make a blues album and, ugh, who would want him to?

Visconti remains the producer on The Next Day, and the record’s packaging makes the connection with the earlier records explicit by repurposing the “Heroes” cover, with the old title crossed out and the new one splashed across a white, Post-It-like square that covers Bowie’s face—witty and self-conscious, Bowie at his best. His serial makeovers have prompted more bad rock criticism than any musician ever, with the exception of Dylan. The reason to listen to Bowie isn’t the posturing but his ability to write hooky, interesting, unobvious tunes that can bear repeated listening. He does that on The Next Day, with several songs—“Valentine’s Day,” “I’d Rather Be High,” and “The Boss of Me” among them—that might have been minor hits in the late 70s or early 80s. (Nothing like a decade off to bank some memorable riffs and melodies.) It’s true that Bowie’s voice has thickened since we last heard him, but that might be a good thing, since it seems to limit the theatrical leaps and campy sobs that sometimes mar his vocals. This is vital, focused music. For a rock star in his seventh decade, that’s a wonder.


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Sources : David Bowie Photo | Listen To The Next Day | David Bowie Biography | The Next Day Review

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