David Bowie – The Next Day
With his first new album in a decade, Bowie takes stock of his musical history to produce a record that wants to look ahead but is trapped in its past.
David Bowie has been many things. A thin white duke. The type of alien who befriends martian spiders. A cocaine-addled soul devotee. A reformed addict. Some of these guises have yielded lastingly potent music. ‘Cracked Actor’ still sounds like it would scald you if you could pour it out of the speakers. ‘Let’s Dance’ still makes you want to do very little but that. ‘African Night Flight’ remains both weirdly compulsive and quietly terrifying, and the ambient stretches on the second side of Low will never fail to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
Bowie’s love of masks, of abandoning himself in favour of outrageous personas, has sent him careening down a few rabbit holes, too. It’s difficult to take in more than a few minutes of the gauche over-theatricality in this clip from the Glass Spider Tour. And Outside, his post-industrial pop album/murder narrative, still feels weird in all the wrong places (with the possible exception of ‘Hallo Spaceboy’).
His past is what makes new album The Next Day so intriguing. The cover art is a bit of a riddle – the album’s title slapped, meme-like, over the cover of a much older and better record. It begs to be read as a statement of forward intent, but demands that the listener consider what came before it. The music on The Next Day suggests that Bowie’s doing the same. It’s clear he wants to move forward, but each track plays out like an interrogation of one or a multiplicity of his past selves. Some of them get along well with each other; others make no sense in such peculiar company.
The title track aspires to the type of rock ‘n’ roll lampoon that could’ve been left off one of his Berlin albums. Bowie’s voice is droll but characteristically histrionic, spilling vitriol over the stomping rock of the verse and hollering forcefully in upper register monotone over the chorus. Throughout, his guitarists desperately try to channel the alchemy with which Adrian Belew laced Lodger. It’s a defiant, successful song, in which he manages to hammer his point home without sounding too much like an old man – but the chorus lyric gives a clue as to how Bowie really feels about his current self and his new music:
“Here I am, not quite dying,
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the next day, and the next, and another day”
If you read the ‘hollow tree’ as a metaphor for his past characters and work, then this is a statement of intent born of restlessness and fear of death. He’s not happy to rest on his laurels and wait to keel over. And so, we can see The Next Day as Bowie’s attempt to parse his own history in the hope of finding something new.
For the first six tracks, this mission feels like a success. ‘Dirty Boys’ lurches theatrically through its verse, run through with filthy baritone sax, as Bowie unsettles us with his prim poetry. ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ is a beautiful tune, laden with grainy woodwinds and graceful strings, showing ‘the Actor’ in fine, disdainful vocal form. ‘Where Are We Now’ sounds as gracefully forlorn on the tenth listen as it does on the first. ‘Love Is Lost’ scolds Bowie’s 22-year-old self with tidy bittersweet guitar pop, and ‘Valentine’s Day’ channels Hunky Dory’s charm effortlessly, with the wordplay of a vocalist who knows much better than he did in 1972.
But it goes off the rails a bit thereafter. The off-kilter prog of ‘If You Can See Me’ just brings to mind the ludicrous theatrical futurism of that Glass Spider clip. ‘I’d Rather Be High’ shows that no one over 50 should ever try to use the word ‘fly’ as a descriptor, even ironically. Its melody reaches for the kind of ill-advised key changes that Bowie could only get away with in the early ’70s on tracks like ‘All The Madmen’, and its allusions to the past feel ingratiating. ‘Dancing Out In Space’ tries and fails to pair Bowie’s presence on Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ with the ambience of his Berlin-era work. There are parts in the latter half of the record that work well–‘Heat’ reminds us that Bowie does a particularly fine Scott Walker impression, invoking the eerie wooziness of Climate Of Hunter–but mostly, he just sounds lost in himself, deferring to old tricks or reverting to formulaic rockism.
At a listening party for the record in Sydney last week, a sterile lounge bar in Darlinghurst was emblazoned with posters of the singer looking sternly at attendant press. The posters announced the album name, along with the tag ‘First album in 10 years from music icon, David Bowie’, almost as though they were trying to qualify his existence or remind those who’d forgotten why he’s important. Sometimes The Next Day feels like Bowie trying to convince himself of these things too, and in those moments, it doesn’t work very well. But when he stops trying to prove anything to anyone and relaxes into himself, he’s still capable of conjuring extraordinary work.
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Luke Telford has written about music for TheVine, The BRAG, Crawlspace, and Cyclic Defrost, among others. He also presents ‘Popular Demand‘, a show about new experimental and pop music, on FBi Radio in Sydney.