How fantastic to have an album as rich and strange as Blackstar that refuses to yield in a few listens.
No, Bowie didn’t give everything away, but on Blackstar he perhaps gave away more than he knew.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Brilliantly, ★ (or Blackstar to the rest of us – humour him, he’s earned it) proves that rather than a curio, or a scratching of a jazzy itch, that single works as a jumping-off point for a bold new stage in a career that was built on creative about-turns.
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.
Across a sparse seven tracks and 41 minutes, the nostalgic, sombre qualities of The Next Day have been exchanged by further explorations into jazz-infected, almost aggressive ecstasy.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Bowie sounds engaged, excited, and sometimes, extraordinary.
★ 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.
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
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
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
this album stares death in the face, and instead of describing what it sees, instead describes the emotions generated in the mind of someone close to the end
i don’t often find myself tearing up at any kind of media, be that music, films or anything else, but this came close (I Can’t Give Everything Away almost sent me)
rest in peace to David Bowie, a musical icon in life and in death
1 | ★ 9:57 | 97 |
2 | 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore 4:52 | 93 |
3 | Lazarus 6:22 | 98 |
4 | Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) 4:40 | 91 |
5 | Girl Loves Me 4:51 | 90 |
6 | Dollar Days 4:44 | 94 |
7 | I Can't Give Everything Away 5:47 | 96 |
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