Archive for “The Next Day”

The #3 Album On The 2013 Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List ™ Is David Bowie’s “The Next Day”

Posted in Music with tags , , , on December 8, 2013 by johnbuckley100

We were astonished then — and are astonished now — that Bowie released an album this year that ranks with Lodger, Station To Station, and Low as high points of a hugely important career.  No, it’s not Diamond Dogs, nor The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.  But it’s also not any of the albums that from 1980 on devalued what Bowie had done in the ’70s.  When The Next Day came out, we were filled with gratitude, and admiration, and joy that we could listen to late-phase Bowie like we listen to late-phase Dylan: an artist who, in maturity, still is capable of producing important work.

As we said at the time:

“To place what an unexpected pleasure it is to listen to The Next Day, it helps to remember that the last time listening to Bowie made us grin from ear to ear was in the climactic scene in Inglourious Basterds, as Shosanna prepares to burn the theater down, and Tarrantino cribbed from the terrible movie Cat People to play Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” as the soundtrack to imminent conflagration. It’s not a particularly good song, though by the early ’80s, it seems like it was about as exciting as Bowie could be.  Yet in the context of Tarrantino’s movie, it was hilarious, and gave us a jolt.  But it was also a sad reminder of how much Bowie really mattered to us in the 1970s — during that string of pearls that began with Hunky Dory and did not end until his final fling with Eno in Lodger.

The return of Bowie to relevance and greatness reminds us, actually, of how exciting it was in 1997 to hear Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind.  Good Lord, we thought, as it came on the radio, he still has it, little knowing that Dylan would go on to create at least two albums that rank with anything he did in the ’60s.  And so we hope it is with Bowie, that upon his return at this level of excellence, as a 66-year old, post-heart attack senior citizen, he can keep producing at the level of The Next Day.”

 

 

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What Sasha Frere-Jones Gets Right, And Wrong, In His Rare Miss On Bowie

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2013 by johnbuckley100

It is unusual for Sasha Frere-Jones to use his bully pulpit in The New Yorker to resist committing to a strong point of view, but when he finished his review of Bowie’s The Next Day with a taunt that “the bar rats can fight it out” over the exact status of the album among Bowie’s canon — declaring it “a fine rock record that is a few hairs away from being among his best,” and that “even the obsessives should be able to accept that” — we were disappointed.

Disappointed because Frere-Jones is, like Jon Mendelsohn, Lester Bangs, R. Meltzer, and Byron Coley before him, among the only voices in the rock criticism of his era that really matter.  While he does not write with anywhere near the pyrotechnical verve of any of these likely mentors, his perch exists at a time where Americans are given the dreary choice between reading the idiots at Rolling Stone, the even bigger idiots who labor under Jon Pareles’ Fidel-like reign at the formerly authoritative New York Times, and the onanistic closed loop in the bell jar that is Pitchfork.  Though it must be acknowledged that Ken Tucker at NPR has a wonderful sensibility, Frere-Jones may be the only main-market rock critic who really has an impact.

So yes, we were disappointed because the passive distancing of “a few hairs away from being among” Bowie’s best violates every rule of resistance to gainsaying, to soft pronouncements,  that we were taught, lo those many years ago, by Andy Schwartz, the great editor of NY Rocker, where we were once a young pup (along with Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, the aforementioned Coley, Glen Morrow, and others.)

If you want to say the album isn’t so good, say it, Sasha.  And if you want to say it’s great, say that.  If it’s somewhere in between?  Find a way of committing to exactly where it stands, without weasel calibrations like “a few hairs away from among his best.”

But that’s not the point of this post, a rare criticism of Frere-Jones.  In his review, Frere-Jones holds up Bowie’s under-appreciated 2002 album Heathen as a “magnificent” collection “with fewer good songs than The Next Day (though) a more cohesive marriage of electronic textures and traditional guitar work, and Bowie was in robust voice.  Bowie and (producer Tony) Visconti worked on that together, and it’s difficult to understand how they could have been so in synch with the moment then but not now.”  So, score a point for Sasha that the production on The Next Day does have that brittle 1980s sound that makes so many of the good albums from that epoch unlistenable today.  And he is right that Heathen, as well as the half-decent follow-up Reality, have a less bombastic, arch sound.  But come on: two of the three best songs on Heathen were written by Black Francis, as if Bowie was so out of it in the 1980s that he only picked up on the Pixies’ genius a decade later.

As between 1) having a production that sounds too much like the ’80s, but a series of great, fresh songs, and 2) a smooth sound set amidst a songwriting dry spell that necessitates having to dip into Black Francis’ bag for inspiration, we’ll take the former.  Frere-Jones is right that the production on The Next Day weakens it, but his inability to commit to what he thinks about it, leaving it to the “bar rats” to decide how good it is, is an abdication of his responsibility.  If an artist played it as safe as he does in his review, we hope he would excoriate them for it.

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“Mr. Bowie’s Twilight Masterpiece”

Posted in Music with tags , on March 10, 2013 by johnbuckley100

We so dreaded this morning, not because of losing an hour’s sleep, but the possibility of revulsion emanating from Jon Pareles being assigned the big New York Times piece on Bowie’s The Next Day.  Thankfully, the editors made the wise decision to assign Simon Reynolds to write a smart piece,, which he has done.  “Now, after his longest musical break ever, the 66-year old Englishman and New York resident is back for what could well be his last blast, the supernova of his stardom.”  We hope that last part is wrong, but the rest of the piece, especially the comparison of the new record to Bowie’s last great one, Lodger, sure rings true.

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Bowie Ends His Silence With A Big Bang

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on March 8, 2013 by johnbuckley100

There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that when Richard Nixon asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution, he replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” May we thus dare venture an opinion on Bowie’s The Next Day — that it’s not just the best thing he’s done since 1979’s Lodger, but may in fact be the most wholly satisfying album of his entire career — without having to wait 200 years to know for sure?  After a solid week of listening to it streamed through the iTunes Store, we’ll take our chances.

To place what an unexpected pleasure it is to listen to The Next Day, it helps to remember that the last time listening to Bowie made us grin from ear to ear was in the climactic scene in Inglourious Basterds, as Shosanna prepares to burn the theater down, and Tarrantino cribbed from the terrible movie Cat People to play Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” as the soundtrack to imminent conflagration. It’s not a particularly good song, though by the early ’80s, it seems like it was about as exciting as Bowie could be.  Yet in the context of Tarrantino’s movie, it was hilarious, and gave us a jolt.  But it was also a sad reminder of how much Bowie really mattered to us in the 1970s — during that string of pearls that began with Hunky Dory and did not end until his final fling with Eno in Lodger.

The return of Bowie to relevance and greatness reminds us, actually, of how exciting it was in 1997 to hear Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind.  Good Lord, we thought, as it came on the radio, he still has it, little knowing that Dylan would go on to create at least two albums that rank with anything he did in the ’60s.  And so we hope it is with Bowie, that upon his return at this level of excellence, as a 66-year old, post-heart attack senior citizen, he can keep producing at the level of The Next Day.

Imagine what it would be like if the Rolling Stones came back, right now, with an album as good as Exile On Main Street.  They won’t — they can’t — because for all their narcissism they don’t take themselves seriously enough.  Bowie does, though, clearly.  If he never produces another record, having produced The Next Day, he will have redeemed three decades of subpar performance, capped by a Rip Van Winkle disappearance and return.

When it was announced in January that Bowie was putting out a new record, and the single “Where Are We Now?” was released, we were underwhelmed.  It sounded like something cribbed from the Berlin Trio — the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger — that he produced with Eno as collaborator and helmsman.  In context on the album, however, “Where Are We Now” is really great.  Next up comes “Valentine,” which is as pop-chart worthy as anything on the overtly commercial Let’s Dance, and if it had been put out prior to February 14th, would have been playing everywhere.  That Bowie chose to reintroduce himself with the more somber, less catchy “Where Are We Now” shows how important his return really is for him.  This record is not about scoring a hit.  It’s about reasserting his claims to greatness.

Most of The Next Day would sound completely at home on a compilation of unreleased tracks from the period beginning with Station To Station.  He even has Earl Slick playing lead!  What is better about the new album than even albums like Heroes is how well the melodies coalesce, how little he seems to strain, how natural his singing is, even at this age.  

The Next Day is the return of a master to a form that we never realized he hadn’t quite yet hit.  How strange it is to introduce, say, a teenager to Bowie and want to start here, not with Ziggy Stardust.  200 years from now, when the verdict really is in on Bowie, we bet the rock historians still start with Ziggy and Alladin Sane, because of course they will gravitate to Bowie as theatrical persona and performance art.  But if you really want to vector in on Bowie’s peak musical performance, we find it bizarre to say, we think you’ll start here.

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Could The New Bowie Album Really Be This Good?

Posted in Music with tags , , , on February 25, 2013 by johnbuckley100

We anxiously await tomorrow’s release of Deathfix by, um, Deathfix.  (Thanks to NPR, we’ve been listening to it streamed all week, and yeah, it’s great!  More anon.)

And yes, we are looking forward to the Atoms for Peace album coming out tomorrow.

But even after reading a great Rolling Stone interview with Tony Visconti, which goes through the new album track-by-track, we have been only mildly interested in the new Bowie album, The Next Day, which comes out in two weeks .  We found the early single, “Where Are We Now,” a little too much like a boring version of “Fantastic Voyage,” from 1979’s Lodger, which come to think of it, was the last really great Bowie album.  (Let’s Dance had its moments, and Scary Monsters had Tom Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come,” but honestly, the downward curve for Bowie in the ’80s matched the Rolling Stones’.) Which left us with nice ’70s memories, warm feelings, and hats-off respect, but nothing since the Golden Years would give us much to get worked up about, at least not at the thought of a new album.

And then comes today’s review in The Telegraph, and holy moly, if this doesn’t get the juices flowing.  Click on the link and read Neil McCormick’s rave, but this’ll give you an idea:

“It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.

Musically, it is stripped and to the point, painted in the primal colours of rock: hard drums, fluid bass, fizzing guitars, shaded by splashes of keyboard and dirty rasps of horns. The 14 songs are short and spiky, often contrasting that kind of patent Bowie one-note declarative drawl with sweet bursts of melodic escape that hit you like a sugar rush. Bowie’s return from a decade’s absence feels very present, although full of sneaky backward glances.”

Read the whole thing.  Wow.  We’ll start poking sofa cushions to find the spare change necessary…

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