This comfort with the now is the most striking thing about Blackstar: it is the sound of a restless artist feeling utterly at ease not only within his own skin but within his own time.

Full Review

Best of 2016

Worst of 2016

Recent Reviews

100

Sputnikmusic

In coming to see David Bowie the man finally portrayed by David Bowie the artist, he not only affirms our natural human hopes and fears, but realizes his own in his final hours. The artist lowers his mask and takes a bow. And the audience applauds.

100

How fantastic to have an album as rich and strange as Blackstar that refuses to yield in a few listens.

100

100

5mo

True to the tone of the record, Bowie is almost a spectre throughout ★. His vocals are often doubled in tight harmonies, or given an alien-like echo that might as well be broadcasts from the beyond. He never sounds less than marvelous, through.

For all its jazz accents and solos, Blackstar ends up becoming a stage for the things that first made Bowie a pop star: his incessantly catchy melodies and elastic voice. With its simple (though oblique) lyrics and endlessly repeated choruses, it’s a secret pop record submerged in the dark places of studio improvisation.

It’s the kind of album that works beautifully as a physical experience – an all-senses headphone surrender to the sound of an artist who is older and almost definitely wiser but still fantastically, singularly himself.

Blackstar has no reference point—it’s destined to be one itself. It’s trippy and majestic head-music spun from moonage daydreams and made for gliding in and out of life.

It’s an album that sums up Bowie as an artist – restless, audacious, constantly looking forward to the next new idea. January may only be a week old, but that ‘Best Of 2016’ list already has a slot filled.

Bowie has always maintained an expert balance between heady intellectualism and histrionic nonsense, both on stage and in the studio, and this record is a fitful combination of the two.

Through his multifarious onstage personas, Bowie had always portrayed a sense of invincibility, so listening to him welcome an infinite dark- ness and silence is overwhelming.

Entertainment icon David Bowie turns his death into an awe-inspiring concept album.

Blackstar will go down as one of the great Bowie albums, not simply for emerging on his deathbed but for the strength of its focus, the scale of its ambition and the clarity with which he incorporates swooning, sinister jazz with contemporary production and emerges with a quintessential statement.

He’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.

Northern Transmissions

It goes without saying that Blackstar isn’t the kind of epochdefining masterpiece that Bowie built his career upon a few years ago. That being said, it does return the songwriter to the unpredictable excitement of that earlier time.

No, Blackstar’s components don’t add up to a perfect whole. Still, it’s as exciting as Bob Dylan’s latter-day masterpieces without the need to look backward for inspiration.

Blackstar is a battle cry against boredom, a wide-eyed drama set in a world just beyond our scopes. It doesn’t get more Bowie than that.

This album represents Bowie's most fulfilling spin away from glam-legend pop charm since 1977's Low. Blackstar is that strange, and that good.

Warped showtunes, skronking industrial rock, soulful balladeering, airy folk-pop, even hip-hop – it all has a place on this busy, bewildering and occasionally beautiful record.

‘Blackstar’ seems to be him giving everything, allowing all of his creative impulses to flourish. If that’s what selfish means, then let’s hope Bowie gives us lots more of it.

It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music.

It’s a defining statement from someone who isn’t interested in living in the past, but rather, for the first time in a while, waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Bowieologists already are likening the album to his great Berlin experiments Low or "Heroes." It's to Bowie's credit that the comparisons don't quite fit. Blackstar is its own strange, perverse thing, the latest move in a boundlessly unpredictable career.

It sounds like a recipe for total fucking disaster, but in fact it’s wonderful: rock’n’roll has largely been purged, and the resultant musical canvases are melancholic, atmospheric, crepuscular affairs that set Bowie free from the banalities that creep into his pop and unleashes his inner dramatist for the first time in an age.

On ★, Bowie has his back to the void, and he's riding it like a wave. He is the cosmic horror, an embodiment of death anxiety that is eternal and crushing. What else can explain his unparalleled quality well into his sixth decade as a pop star?

It’d be quite the impenetrable send off were this the end of his career, but as he’s proven time and time again, it always feels like he’s got something else to prove regardless of the time it takes him to get there.

Blackstar is defiantly a thing of its own, allowing Bowie to revisit his career-spanning, paradoxical fears—either that his life is ending imminently, or that it never will—with fascinating new sounds.

Which pop stars have lived or even remained relevant long enough to commemorate their own deaths in song? And who has done it so cannily, with as much shimmer, spunk, and rude humor, with as much life as Bowie did here? The album may or may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a heartbreaker, a miracle.

Bowie has always been an artist who reframes his own past – the liberal use here of his beloved saxophone a case in point – and whilst the lyrical trails are necessarily opaque, the arrangements don’t rely on vogue to foster the narrative (as perhaps was the case with much of his 1990s output).

David Bowie’s genius here has been in jettisoning his regular cohorts, whose safe pairs of hands might have taken these songs to a less visceral, more orthodox place, instead of this new frontier from which to contemplate innerspace.

Although there's cosmic energy in the music's upward trajectory, it comes from a decidedly earthbound live-off-the-floor approach rather than meticulously sculpted production.

If this time it did turn out to be his final studio album, it would be a perfectly acceptable way to end his career, in a way that seems unmistakably Bowie.

It's a finale that suggests a Bowie desperate to break with the past, but acknowledging it'll always be with him – however hard he tries here.

Although Blackstar is a Bowie album through and through, suffused with his distinct melodic voice and Bowie’s preferred instrument of the 80s – the saxophone – there’s a scorched earth feel to its seven, often lengthy, tracks.

Bowie’s latest doesn’t need to haunt in order to dig deep, but these seven tracks have enough power and depth to be unpacked for years.

10mo

5mo

★ finds Bowie and longtime producer Tony Visconti as hungry as they ever were, and with no modern context into which the artist can insert himself (including rock) he’s free to do what he likes.

Lyrically, Bowie it at his best here when he dives fully into off-kilter impressionism and ponders the uncertain present and apocalyptic future.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Full Review

User Reviews

View All

Plats

100

I was 14 years of age when "Blackstar" came out. I wasn't as advanced a listener as I am now, but I still appreciated music and I was still a huge fan of the David Bowie. After I listened to it for the first time on January 8th, I thought it was a great album at the time. Since I was, like everyone else, oblivious to what was happening to Bowie, I thought he was reflecting on his past life and just wanting to go back to those times since he was at an old age.

But then, something ... read more

2y*

snarekickblues

A friend texted to inform me about about his death while I was listening to this album. Lazarus had just begun, and Bowie had just finished singing the first verse when my phone vibrated.

Strange

Jamobo

David Bowie’s Blackstar - The Artist Facing Death

If I described David Bowie as a once in a generation talent, that would be a misnomer, as there hasn’t really been anyone in the 50+ years since he debuted in 1967 that can truly match up to his musical legacy. I won’t really get into what makes him such a legend, either you already know or you have yet to properly experience his expansive and explorative work. And that experience will tell you far more than any of my words ... read more

6mo

Inglume

(Thoughts, 2021-05-24)
Can't say I'm invested in many of this record's musical endeavours nowadays. Its art rock-jazz mixtures (exception here is the first-half of 'Blackstar') leave an odd impression and doesn't exactly amount to the most interesting batch of ideas. At its least convincing moments, just a tad wacky for its concept.

But in a sense, I've gained much respect for Bowie with this final breath of a record. Obviously conceived with the inevitable onset of death, Blackstar is ... read more

2y*

exception

the perfect way to go out. theres no way that bowie did not know that his time would come soon after this album, because some of the topics are just so emotional. the jazz sounds were really breathtaking, and bowie's vocals were still incredible, after over 40 years into his career.
fav tracks: lazaras, i cant give everything away, girl loves me

More user reviews

Purchasing ★ [Blackstar] from Amazon helps support Album of the Year. Or consider a donation?

#10

More Albums

View All

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

Track List

1	"Blackstar" 9:57	95
2	'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore 4:52	91
3	Lazarus 6:22	94
4	Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) 4:40	90
5	Girl Loves Me 4:51	88
6	Dollar Days 4:44	90
7	I Can't Give Everything Away 5:47	93