New David Bowie set
The online version of the UK's Guardian newspaper today reviews what sounds like a terrific new release of mid-70s material by the master (or maybe mistress), the late David Bowie.
It fits between Bowie's albums "The Gouster" (never knew what that meant; alas, I still DON'T) and the better-known (but, in my view, terribly depressing) Young Americans.
"There’s no room [in the former] for anything as straightforwardly gorgeous as Win, or Fame’s slick cynicism, or even the beatific message that lurks somewhere beneath Bowie’s scenery-chewing performance of Across the Universe.
"Instead, you get the corrupt demagogue portrayed on Somebody Up There Likes Me; the twitchy, agitated note-to-self that is Right (“never no turning back … never been known to fail”); and Young Americans itself. It’s easy to miss what a spectacularly grim lyric that song offers, buffeted as it is by carefree sax breaks and a joyous chorus, but it opens with a dismal sexual encounter that an apparently desperate woman accepts as her due ('heaven knows she’d have taken anything') and gets progressively less cheery from there: spousal abuse, political corruption, intimations of suicidal thoughts, a depiction of ageing as slow death and of emotional numbness that not even music can touch. You somehow notice its tenor more as the penultimate track on The Gouster than as the opener of the album..."
.
It fits between Bowie's albums "The Gouster" (never knew what that meant; alas, I still DON'T) and the better-known (but, in my view, terribly depressing) Young Americans.
"There’s no room [in the former] for anything as straightforwardly gorgeous as Win, or Fame’s slick cynicism, or even the beatific message that lurks somewhere beneath Bowie’s scenery-chewing performance of Across the Universe.
"Instead, you get the corrupt demagogue portrayed on Somebody Up There Likes Me; the twitchy, agitated note-to-self that is Right (“never no turning back … never been known to fail”); and Young Americans itself. It’s easy to miss what a spectacularly grim lyric that song offers, buffeted as it is by carefree sax breaks and a joyous chorus, but it opens with a dismal sexual encounter that an apparently desperate woman accepts as her due ('heaven knows she’d have taken anything') and gets progressively less cheery from there: spousal abuse, political corruption, intimations of suicidal thoughts, a depiction of ageing as slow death and of emotional numbness that not even music can touch. You somehow notice its tenor more as the penultimate track on The Gouster than as the opener of the album..."
.