
Bowie's vocal tour de force is a restless
album jumping genres from track
to track. The Thin
White Duke is like a manic host insisting you see all the city's clubs in just
one night. Epic mounds of cocaine-induced genre jitters, they say, but can
vocals this restrained and cadenced be achieved in a dopamine frenzy? You
wouldn't think. Bowie moves
from funk to funky and ties it all up with his WW ballads, "Word on a Wing" and
Dimitri Tiomkin's Oscar nominated "Wild is the Wind," which drip with enough
melodrama to make Roy Orbison cry. What's
missing here? Nothing, and
that is the issue. We've
got funky, we've got Motorik; it's Philly R&B though Euro-centric. It's Earl Slick and
Roy Bitten and Carlos Alomar who said, "It
was one of the most glorious albums that we've ever done ... We experimented so
much on it," and hardly knew when to stop. NME described it as having "an air of regret for missed opportunities and past
pleasures." It's just all
over the place: it's great then it's not, then it apologizes and makes up for it, overdoes it again. It was indeed drug-induced genius, but
does that belittle it? Face
it, Dark Side of the Moon was all the more fabulous because you
were just so high. Bowie
stated that he only "knew he was in L.A., because he had read that he was in L.A." It's an
album that came out of a stupor. So do most of our best memories.
The myth that is the Berlin Trilogy (Low was recorded in France and Lodger in Switzerland) tends to negate this author's insistence that Station to Station, Low and Heroes are a continuum and a much more cohesive trilogy. Lodger is a different album altogether, despite its production.
The myth that is the Berlin Trilogy (Low was recorded in France and Lodger in Switzerland) tends to negate this author's insistence that Station to Station, Low and Heroes are a continuum and a much more cohesive trilogy. Lodger is a different album altogether, despite its production.