BY MICHAEL GOODPASTER
I’m not sure if you know this, but prayer can in fact be answered sometimes. A few weeks ago David Bowie unofficially/officially dropped his latest album The Next Day. It’s been about a million years since David Bowie put out an album. Though many critics and snobs will say his later work isn’t that great, I’ve always been a fan. Some would even say a super fan. He’s easily one of my favorite musicians and performers of all time. Like all Bowie fanatics, I’ve clamored over new material the past few years. I’ve listened to and loved his back catalogue over and over to the point that its melodies are part of my natural pulse. When you’re a fan of something, you have to maintain a respectful balance. On one side of it you want to respect the artist and make sure you’re getting the best quality work from them when they want to share it. The other side is a bit more common. You just want MORE. MORE. MORE.
David Bowie gives us MORE with The Next Day. The cover is awesome. It’s the iconic 1977 Heroes cover, but with a big white square covering with the simplest of texts. That’s pretty ballsy and in itself one of the coolest album covers I’ve seen in a long time. It’s an artistic “fuck you” to conformity and bland commercialism.
Then we listen to the album itself. Off the bat, I’ll tell you this. It’s not full of radio-friendly easy to digest rockers. I’m not saying it doesn’t rock, it certainly does, but it’s not an album with a clear cut stand out. It’s a collage of sounds Bowie pieced together over a few years of top secret recording. I could go track by track and give some kind of crazy review. I assure you it would get really deep and cross levels of existentialism that a normal person would not want to read. I dug it all. I’m sure after listening to it a few dozen more times that I’ll connect with some tracks more than others. I’ll just say I recommend it. Listen to it when you have an hour to absorb it. You don’t want to listen to in segments. You want to take the hour and take in the full vibe of it. The stand outs from the first listen or so to me were “Love Is Lost”, “Valentine’s Day”, “I’d Rather Be High”, “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”, and the closer “Heat”. This will change every listen for a while. The best way to make up your own mind is to listen.
You can’t call this a “comeback album” because David Bowie never leaves us. What the album provides is an overwhelming warm of experience. It’s not a warning to the youth. It’s not that Bowie is a bitter old man who wants us young people to shape up. It’s more of a stern apathy from a star-eyed child. David Bowie knows he’s David Bowie, but he also knows the man behind the curtain. We get both divided by only an elegant haze of true art. He isn’t so much as jaded, but he knows what he’s seen and he knows what he has experienced both internally and externally. It’s amazing how someone can make you feel so comfortable and make you relate to every emotive metaphor, yet still pull you into places you never expected.
Did I mention I’m a fan?
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