Login
"All my life I have tried earnestly to do my best with what I had," reads the opening words of a song from a few years ago, a song about always feeling out of place and out of time. Hard to say if the new album is really the best expression of what David Bowie today. It sure is a disc out of time and from any more common commercial logic. Beginning with the single of the same name, written for the television series "The Last Panthers": a suite ten minutes long that blends two distinct compositions and that seems to repeat, with his pace to Scott Walker, the apocalyptic tones and spectral "Heat", the closing track of "The next day," the mantra of "and I tell myself, I do not know who I am." With one important change, however: the use of a musical language that, for the most part, located in the energy dissonant jazz experimental as core driving force.
In fact, although the co-production there is once again the historical companion Tony Visconti, to translate into sound scores of rock "★" is a bunch of musicians rehearsed avant-jazz (and "post-bop") led by the talented saxophonist Californian Donny McCaslin. Soloing, improvisation and virtuosity of the latter underpin the whole album, accompanied by changes in electrical Ben Monder (guitar), Tim Lefebvre (bass) and Jason Lindner (keyboards), but above all by the inventions of young rhythmic drummer Mark Guiliana, a Fans of electronic music by Squarepusher, Aphex Twin and Photek. The stylistic imprint of the new band, to which was added James Murphy aka LCD Soundsystem (on percussion in only a couple of songs), is profound. Gives the entire work a completeness and consistency that "The next day", to name the disk latest White Duke, he had not. But above all, for 41 minutes, casts Bowie in a very unusual sound dimension.
There are seven new songs (almost equaled the record for brevity of "Station to Station" which enumerates six, for a total of 38 minutes ...), two of which had already been published last year, but in a different guise. In the hands of McCaslin and his companions, in fact, the single "Her (Or in a season of crime)," hybrid drum'n'bass present in the collection "Nothing has changed", and its gloomy B-side "'Tis a pity she was a whore "(title borrowed from the work of John Ford's Theatre on the theme of incest which debuted in London in the distant 1629) become thunderous electric rides at the service of melodramatic voice of Bowie. They serve as the backdrop to "Lazarus", the song that gives title to the musical by David Bowie and Enda Walsh (sequel to "The Man Who Fell to Earth") that made its successful debut last December 7 at the New York Theatre Workshop. Hypnotic and dark as it was a "slip away" (the ethereal ballatona of "heathen") dedicated to the followers of Joy Division, The Cure and Tuxedomoon, "Lazarus" has a more traditional rock structure and has all the ingredients of the Bowie classic : sumptuous vocal interpretation, text visionary theme "Space" ("Look up here, I'm in heaven / I've got scars That can not be seen"), great arrangements and an electric sax memorable. In "Girl loves me", instead, to get in the chair is the drummer Guiliana. His vehement syncopated drumming frames a particularly cryptic text, built by Bowie using the vocabulary of Nadsat, the Anglo-Russian slang invented by Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. " Following is "Dollar Days", bittersweet ballad punctuated by guitar Monder and dragged by the tenor of McCaslin. And 'the prelude to the grand finale that comes with "I can not give everything away" (title autobiographical?), A six-minute epic orchestral openings and leaks guitar with Bowie, sporting his unmistakable vibrato while, in the background, a' harmonica solo rekindles the memory of ancient adventures in Berlin.
Ambitious and unsettling, "★" reserve continual surprises from start to finish. It 'a relatively hard disk that grows each time you listen and, meanwhile, carves out a prominent place among the bravest of the album King of change artists: remarkable feat for an artist to come to the finish line of the 69 springs.
