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David Bowie: Blackstar

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: ISO Records / Columbia
Released: 2016.01.08
Time:
 41:06
Category: Art Rock, Experimental Rock, Jazz
Producer(s): David Bowie, Tony Visconti
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.davidbowie.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Blackstar (D.Bowie) - 9:57
[2] 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore (D.Bowie) - 4:52
[3] Lazarus (D.Bowie) - 6:22
[4] Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) (D.Bowie) - 4:40
[5] Girl Loves Me (D.Bowie) - 4:51
[6] Dollar Days (D.Bowie) - 4:44
[7] I Can't Give Everything Away (D.Bowie) - 5:47

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


David Bowie - Vocals, Acoustic Guitar, String Arrangements, Fender Guitar on [3], Harmonica on [7], Mixing, Producer

Donny McCaslin - Flute, Saxophone, Woodwinds
Ben Monder - Guitar
Jason Lindner - Piano, Organ, Keyboards
Tim Lefebvre - Bass
Mark Guiliana - Drums, Percussion
Tony Visconti - Production, Strings
James Murphy - Percussion on [4,5]

Tony Visconti – Producer, Strings, Engineering, Mixing Engineer
Kevin Killen – Engineering
Erin Tonkon – Assistant Engineer, Backing Vocals on [2]
Tom Elmhirst – Mixing Engineer
Joe Visciano – Mixing Assistant
Kabir Hermon – Assistant Engineer
Joe Laporta – Mastering Engineer

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded at the studios The Magic Shop (New York City), Human Worldwide Studios (New York City).



Three years ago, with little warning, David Bowie ended a decade-long break from studio releases with The Next Day. The second album he's released since that unexpected return to the limelight is an even greater surprise: one of the most aggressively experimental records the singer has ever made. Produced with longtime collaborator Tony Visconti and cut with a small combo of New York-based jazz musicians whose sound is wreathed in arctic electronics, Blackstar is a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing. It's confounding on first impact: the firm swing and giddy vulgarity of " 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore"; Bowie's croons and groans, like a doo-wop Kraftwerk, in the sexual dystopia of "Girl Loves Me"; the spare beaten-spirit soul of "Dollar Days." But the mounting effect is wickedly compelling. This album represents Bowie's most fulfilling spin away from glam-legend pop charm since 1977's Low. Blackstar is that strange, and that good.

The longest reach is up front, in the episodic, ceremonial noir of the title track. Bowie's gauzy vocal prayer and wordless spectral harmonies hover over drum seizures; saxophonist Donny McCaslin laces the stutter and chill like Andy Mackay in early-Seventies Roxy Music. The song drops to a blues-ballad stroll, but it is an eerie calm with unsettling allusions to violent sacrifice, especially given recent events. (No who or why is specified, but McCaslin has said the song is "about ISIS.") "Something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter, then stepped aside," Bowie sings with what sounds like numbed grace. "Somebody else took his place and bravely cried: I'm a blackstar." His use of an ideogram for the album's title makes sense here – there is no light at the end of this tale.

The album includes a dynamic honing of Bowie's 2014 single "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" with less brass and more malevolent programming; the title song from his current off-Broadway musical production, Lazarus (that's Bowie firing those grunting blasts of guitar); and a blunt honesty at the finish. Bowie turns 69 on January 8th, the day Blackstar comes out. In "I Can't Give Everything Away," he states his case for the dignity of distance – his refusal to tour (so far) and engage with the media circus – against guitarist Ben Monder's lacerating soprano-fuzz guitar, a sly evocation of Robert Fripp's iconic soloing in 1977's "Heroes." "This is all I ever meant/That's the message that I sent," Bowie sings in a voice largely free of effects – clear, elegant and emphatic. This is a rock star who gives when he's ready – and still gives to extremes.

David Fricke December 23, 2015
© 2016 Rolling Stone



Pop music may still (and always) be a young person’s game, but a rock star with an AARP card is not exactly an anomaly these days. If anything, it’s more about what kind of elder statesman a seasoned artist chooses to be: Are you Cool Grandad Paul McCartney, playing strummy-casual third Musketeer to Kanye West and Rihanna and jamming out Nirvana covers with Dave Grohl? A defiantly rumpled rabble-rouser à la Neil Young? Or maybe more of a classic Billy Joel, cranking out vintage Piano Man hits monthly for a seemingly unquenchable audience at Madison Square Garden?

David Bowie, who returned with his 26th studio album on Friday – a date that also happens to coincide with his 69th birthday – can’t be easily slotted among any of these. Then again, that’s hardly surprising; The Man Who Fell to Earth has made an entire career of defying terrestrial categories and classification. As much as Bowie the Artist can be defined, it’s only in the most elusive terms: He is our eternal iconoclast, he is stardust, he is normcore Kryptonite.

Or, as he drawls on Blackstar’s chilly, undulating self-titled opener, after enumerating all the things he isn’t (film-star, pop-star, gang-star), “You’re a flash in the pan/I’m the Great I Am.” Which would sound like just another rap-blog-level boast, if it weren’t so demonstrably true. Like nearly all his records, this one is a fully immersive experience; trips to Bowie-land – a place where every encounter is a metaphysical hall of mirrors, all the hours are after hours, and the cult of personality has its own G-force – don’t really come any other way.

Nearly every track on Blackstar is strange and unnerving, almost wraithlike, but beautiful too; threaded through with elements of elegantly skronked-out jazz, serrated guitar lines, and swooning orchestral flourishes. (Longtime collaborator Tony Visconti is billed as coproducer, and a cadre of young jazz-world luminaries appear, including Donny McCaslin, Ben Monder, and Mark Guiliana.) The dreamy, multilayered “Lazarus” sounds like some gorgeous song-Frankenstein strung together from disparate but oddly complementary scraps of history: part smoky Weimar cabaret circa 1933, part Tortoise studio session circa 1993. “Sue or In a Season of Crime” is galloping and urgent, a cracked domestic dream of determined reassurances (“I’ve got the job/We’ll buy the house”; “The clinic called/The X-ray’s fine”) that turn desperate and vaguely murderous when Sue leaves the narrator for another man. “Girl Loves Me” is a slow, delicious spiral into nonsense and stomping melody whose only clear lyrical takeaway is the indignant refrain: “Where the f— did Monday go?” (Anyone looking for a little Victorian storytelling with their sadomasochism might like the arch, giddy, and wildly saxophoned “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” even more).

Lines can be drawn from Blackstar back to Space Oddity and Aladdin Sane, the three-piece-suit-on-MTV ’80s and the industrial darkness and moody experiments of the ’90s and ’00s. But Bowie has never been much of a nostalgic or a self-mythologizer; he can’t be, really, when his vision beams so consistently in one direction: forward. Maybe that’s why Blackstar feels so vital, and arguably better than anything he’s done in years. There are more than enough narratives to follow down the rabbit hole here, and themes and imagery so dense they could probably be dissected for days or even weeks. Most of all, though, it’s the kind of album that works beautifully as a physical experience – an all-senses headphone surrender to the sound of an artist who is older and almost definitely wiser but still fantastically, singularly himself.

Leah Greenblatt - January 8 2016
Copyright © 2016 Entertainment Weekly



As he reaches his 69th birthday, David Bowie finds himself in a rarefied position, even by the standards of the rock aristocracy. He does not give interviews, make himself available to promote new releases, or explain himself in any way. He does not tour the world playing his hits. In fact, he doesn’t do anything that rock stars are supposed to do. It’s behaviour that theoretically means a one-way ticket to oblivion, with no one but diehard fans for company. But since his re-emergence from a decade-long sabbatical with 2013’s The Next Day, it’s proved a quite astonishing recipe for success. Bowie’s scant public pronouncements are treated as hugely significant. His releases are pored over in a way they haven’t been since the days when his army of devotees would turn up at Victoria station to greet him off the boat train, a state of affairs abetted by the fact that, since his return, Bowie has reverted to writing the kind of elusive, elliptical lyrics that were once his stock in trade. Dense with mysterious references, the words on The Next Day and its follow-up alike have far more in common with the impenetrable mass of signifiers that made up Station to Station’s title track than, say, the Dad-misses-you-write-soon message to his adult son of 2002’s Everyone Says Hi.
David Bowie's Blackstar video: a gift of sound and vision or all-time low?
Read more

His 25th studio album concludes with I Can’t Give Everything Away, which seems to offer those attempting to unravel his lyrics a wry “best of luck with that” (“Saying no but meaning yes, this is all I ever meant, that’s the message that I sent”) while loudly trumpeting his own carefully maintained mystique. “I can’t give everything, I can’t give everything away,” he sings, over and over. It’s a beautiful, elegant song borne on clouds of synthesiser and decorated with a scrawly guitar solo, but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that its lyrical admonishments aren’t going to make much difference: the bits of Blackstar that emerged in advance of the album have already been thoroughly examined for meaning.

The most compelling interpretation – bolstered by a remark made by Donny McCaslin, the New York jazz musician whose electro-acoustic trio forms the core of the backing band on Blackstar – is that the album’s opening title track is Bowie’s response to the rise of Isis. It seemed plausible: Bowie has always been fascinated both by messianic dictators – not least the relationship of their power to that of celebrity – and by the idea that the world is facing a future so terrifying that the thought of it, as he once put it, makes your brain hurt a lot. The theory was subsequently denied by Bowie’s spokesperson, which seems a shame: there’s a pleasing circularity to the idea of a muse that burst into life amid what the writer Francis Wheen called the “collective nervous breakdown” of the 1970s, apparently sparking up again amid the collective nervous breakdown of the present day.

But aside from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s supposed elevation to the pantheon of Bowie bogeymen – thence to swap tips on global domination with Big Brother, President Joe and his murderous Saviour Machine, and the cannibalistic Hungry Men off Bowie’s debut album – and the reappearance of Thomas Newton, antihero of The Man Who Fell to Earth, amid the alternately gorgeous and unsettling drift of Lazarus, Blackstar frequently sounds like a slate-cleaning break with the past.

Bowie’s back catalogue is peppered with jazz-influenced moments – from his 1965 attempt to mimic Georgie Fame, Take My Tip, to Mike Garson’s improvised piano playing on the title track of Aladdin Sane, to his duet with Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Lester Bowie on the Black Tie White Noise track Looking for Lester. But Blackstar’s enthusiastic embrace of the genre feels as if it has less in common with his previous jazz dabblings than it does his headlong plunge into contemporary soul on Young Americans: designed as a decisive, wilful shift away from the past. Just as it seems highly unlikely that anyone who heard Diamond Dogs in 1974 could have predicted that, within a year, its author would be starring on America’s premier black music show, Soul Train, so it seems fairly safe to say that no one who enjoyed the relatively straightforward rock music of The Next Day thought its follow-up would sound like this.

More striking still is the synergy between Bowie and the musicians on Blackstar. You can hear it in Bowie’s whoop as McCaslin solos amid the sonic commotion of ’Tis Pity She Was a Whore. He sounds delighted at the racket they’re creating, and understandably so. Simultaneously wilfully synthetic and squirmingly alive, it has the same thrilling sense of exploratory, barely contained chaos found on “Heroes” or Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), or in the tumultuous, wildly distorted version of the Spiders from Mars that rampaged through Panic in Detroit and Cracked Actor. Better still, it doesn’t actually sound anything like those records.

And you can hear it by comparing the album version of Sue (or in the Season of Crime) with the single released in 2014. The earlier version felt like a statement rather than a song; a series of ideas (drum’n’bass-inspired rhythm, Maria Schneider’s high-minded, uncommercial big-band jazz, a fragmentary lyric) thrown together to let the world know that Bowie wasn’t done with being avant-garde yet. It did that job pretty well, but never became a satisfying whole. On Blackstar, however, everything coalesces. The rhythm is sample-based and punchier, the agitated bass riff distorted and driving, the seasick brass and woodwind arrangement is replaced by sprays of echoing feedback, electronic noise and sax. It sounds like a band, rather than Bowie grafting himself on to someone else’s musical vision.

Over the years, rock has frequently reduced experimental jazz to a kind of dilettantish signifier: few things say “I consider myself to be a very important artist unleashing a challenging musical statement, I demand you take me seriously” quite like a burst of skronking free brass dropped in the middle of a track. But Blackstar never feels like that. Nor does it feel like it’s trying too hard, an accusation that could have been leveled at the drum’n’bass puttering of 1997’s Earthling.

Blackstar lacks the kind of killer pop single Bowie would once invariably come up with amid even his most experimental works – a Sound and Vision, a Heroes, a Golden Years – but only Girl Loves Me feels like a slog: lots of Clockwork Orange Nadsat and a smattering of Polari in the incomprehensible lyrics, thuddingly propulsive drums, no tune. Instead, you’re struck by the sense of Bowie at his most commanding, twisting a genre to suit his own ends. Dollar Days might be the most straightforwardly beautiful thing here, a lambent ballad that doesn’t sound jazz influenced at all. But it’s lent a curious, slippery uncertainty at odds with the bullish lyrical pronouncements (“If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to, it’s nothing to me”) by Mark Guiliana’s drumming, the emphasis never quite landing where rock-trained ears might expect it to.

The overall effect is ambiguous and spellbinding, adjectives that apply virtually throughout Blackstar. It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music.

Alexis Petridis - Thursday 7 January 2016
© 2016 Guardian News and Media



Usually, singers become more mainstream as they age, their catalogue more likely to be expanded via the Great American Songbook than personal inspiration. But on his 69th birthday early in January, David Bowie releases the most extreme album of his entire career: Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop. On “Girl Loves Me”, the brooding horn shadings offer ominous accompaniment to Bowie's quirky delivery of a cipher-song incorporating elements of the Nadsat vocabulary of A Clockwork Orange and the gay code-language polari, while the 10-minute title track sketches an execution ritual amid a miasmic, Middle-Eastern wash of strings and scrabbling sax.

Elsewhere, there's an oceanic melancholy to the moody, cinematic “Lazarus”, in which the alien played by Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth considers his purgatorial situation while fog-like sax swirls around his fugitive presence. Both “'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” are frantic, bustling whirls of avant-garde, banshee sax improvisation and drumming, while Bowie croons about deathly portents and desire: they're like footnotes to the transitional experiments of “Station to Station”, but with less potent melodies, and less interest in pleasing forms.

Although the intro vamp of “Dollar Days” offers a more congenial rhythmic base, the amorphously mooning sax blurs things enough for Bowie to sound like a man adrift in events he desperately needs to control. “I'm trying to,” he sings, “I'm dying to.” Or is that “I'm dying, too”? – a query that lingers as “I Can't Give Everything Away” closes the album with a satisfying climax of freely flowing sax and the album's sole guitar break. It's a finale that suggests a Bowie desperate to break with the past, but acknowledging it'll always be with him – however hard he tries here.

Andy Gill - 8 January 2016
EMN



David Bowie has died many deaths yet he is still with us. He is popular music’s ultimate Lazarus: Just as that Biblical figure was beckoned by Jesus to emerge from his tomb after four days of nothingness, Bowie has put many of his selves to rest over the last half-century, only to rise again with a different guise. This is astounding to watch, but it's more treacherous to live through; following Lazarus’ return, priests plotted to kill him, fearing the power of his story. And imagine actually being such a miracle man—resurrection is a hard act to follow.

Bowie knows all this. He will always have to answer to his epochal work of the 1970s, the decade in which he dictated several strands of popular and experimental culture, when he made reinvention seem as easy as waking up in the morning. Rather than trying to outrun those years, as he did in the '80s and '90s, he is now mining them in a resolutely bizarre way that scoffs at greatest-hits tours, nostalgia, and brainless regurgitation.

His new off-Broadway musical is called Lazarus, and it turns Bowie’s penchant for avatars into an intriguing shell game: The disjointed production features actor Michael C. Hall doing his best impression of Bowie’s corrupted, drunk, and immortal alien from the 1976 art film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Trapped in a set that mimics a Manhattan penthouse, Hall presses himself up to his high skyscraper windows as he sings a new Bowie song also called "Lazarus." "This way or no way, you know, I’ll be free," he sings, smudging his hands against the glass. "Just like that bluebird." Bowie sings the same song on Blackstar, an album that has him clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall.

Following years of troubling silence, Bowie returned to the pop world with 2013’s The Next Day. The goodwill surrounding his return could not overcome the album’s overall sense of stasis, though. Conversely, on Blackstar, he embraces his status as a no-fucks icon, a 68-year-old with "nothing left to lose," as he sings on "Lazarus." The album features a quartet of brand-new collaborators, led by the celebrated modern jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose repertoire includes hard bop as well as skittering Aphex Twin covers. Bowie’s longtime studio wingman Tony Visconti is back as co-producer, bringing along with him some continuity and a sense of history.

Because as much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation is not without precedent in his work. Bowie’s first proper instrument was a saxophone, after all, and as a preteen he looked up to his older half-brother Terry Burns, who exposed him to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Beat Generation ideals. The links connecting Bowie, his brother, and jazz feel significant. Burns suffered from schizophrenia throughout his life; he once tried to kill himself by jumping out of a mental hospital window and eventually committed suicide by putting himself in front of a train in 1985.

Perhaps this helps explain why Bowie has often used jazz and his saxophone not for finger-snapping pep but rather to hint at mystery and unease. It’s there in his close collaborations with avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson, from 1973’s "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)" all the way to 2003’s "Bring Me the Disco King." It’s in his wild squawks on 1993’s "Jump They Say," an ode to Burns. But there is no greater example of the pathos that makes Bowie’s saxophone breathe than on "Subterraneans" from 1977’s Low, one of his most dour (and influential) outré moments. That song uncovered a mood of future nostalgia so lasting that it’s difficult to imagine the existence of an act like Boards of Canada without it. Completing the circle, Boards of Canada were reportedly one of Bowie’s inspirations for Blackstar. At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

Thematically, Blackstar pushes on with the world-weary nihilism that has marked much of his work this century. "It’s a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything," he mused around the release of 2003’s Reality. "It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth." Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. The rollicking "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" gets its name from a controversial 17th-century play in which a man has sex with his sister only to stab her in the heart in the middle of a kiss. Bowie’s twist involves some canny gender-bending ("she punched me like a dude"), a robbery, and World War I, but the gist is the same—humans will always resort to a language of savagery when necessary, no matter where or when. See also: "Girl Loves Me," which has Bowie yelping in the slang originated by A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs.

Though this mix of jazz, malice, and historical role-play is intoxicating, Blackstar becomes whole with its two-song denouement, which balances out the bruises and blood with a couple of salty tears. These are essentially classic David Bowie ballads, laments in which he lets his mask hang just enough for us to see the creases of skin behind it. "Dollar Days" is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. "I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again," he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career. Then, on "I Can’t Give Everything Away," he once again sounds like a frustrated Lazarus, stymied by a returning pulse. This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.


Ryan Dombal; January 7, 2016
© 2016 Condé Nast. (Pitchfork)



Three years ago, with nary a hint of warning, David Bowie returned after a decade-long absence with the single “Where Are We Now?” (released on his 66th birthday), and word that a new album, The Next Day, was on the horizon. It was a stunning return for an artist who many assumed had permanently retired from recording. Fortunately, instead of one last hurrah by an aging musical legend, The Next Day appears to have been the start of an exciting new phase in Bowie’s career. Of course, given that he’s well-known for his fearless experimentalism and versatility, it can hardly be considered surprising that the second release since his comeback is nothing like its predecessor. Blackstar is Bowie’s most unconventional album since his dual ‘70s masterpieces Low and ”Heroes”, and is a breathtaking and relentlessly fascinating piece of work.

Producer Tony Visconti, who has collaborated on many of Bowie’s greatest triumphs stretching back all the way back to the Space Oddity album in 1969, is once again at the helm for Blackstar. Visconti told Rolling Stone Magazine, “The goal was to avoid rock and roll.” Avoid it they did, but not entirely. Blackstar swerves as close as Bowie has ever come to progressive rock, an amorphous sub-genre in which artists pull energy from just about every imaginable musical source, including jazz and cinematic soundscapes, to create often lengthy and obtuse pieces that aren’t immediately penetrable but require open ears and repeated listens to absorb with any real sense of meaning. Blackstar fits that description, particularly with the strong jazz influences, but that’s still not exactly dead-on. Blackstar is previously unexplored territory for a man who’s already plotted more flags on the musical terrain than anybody else in rock history. There are no potential hits here, not even much in the way of traditional song structures. Blackstar gives away almost nothing on first listen. It’s so outré and surreal that it’s impossible to wrap your head around immediately. It’s like diving into a deep and shadowy lake with endless underwater crevices to explore.

Blackstar opens with the 10-minute title track—the last time Bowie opened an album with an epic this ambitious was the title song to Station to Station which, perhaps coincidentally, turns 40 later this month. “Blackstar” first appeared as the opening theme for the European crime drama mini-series The Last Panthers in October of last year. Over a taut rhythm, Bowie’s choral-like multi-tracked drone belongs in an alien cult’s sacred rite of mourning. It’s a solemn intergalactic hymn that Major Tom might have heard on the glowing planet he mentions in “Ashes to Ashes” while strung out on heaven’s high. Bowie’s chant-like vocals are those of a tormented phantom, as he sings lines like “On the day of execution / only women kneel and smile / at the center of it all / your eyes, your eyes.”

At about the 4:00 mark there is a transition marked by glistening strings until Bowie’s spectral vocals glide in over a subtle guitar part glowing with reverb. The mood is entirely different, with the manic repetition of “I’m a blackstar!” anchoring the end of each line. Then at about the 7:45 point, the song shifts back to the tense drama of the first half. Musically, as with the rest of the album, the vibe is tight, compact, mathematically precise and controlled.

The concept of the black star has numerous meanings in the worlds of the occult, alchemy, astrology, mythology and philosophy. Fans and critics will be dissecting the song’s enigmatic and striking imagery well into the future. Bowie himself isn’t talking—he hasn’t given an interview in over a decade—but he is clearly as invested in this music as anything he’s ever done. This is evident by his deeply compelling performance in the song’s hypnagogic video, which abounds with dark religious iconography and stark celestial scenery. “Blackstar” is the album’s throbbing heart, encompassing nearly one-fourth of its length and setting its tone.

“‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” first appeared as the b-side to the new single Bowie recorded for last year’s compilation Nothing Has Changed, “Sue (or in a Season of Crime)”. The version here is far more fully developed thanks to the fiery performances by Bowie’s ace collaborators: New York City-based musicians Donny McCaslin (whose phenomenal sax work is one of the album’s sonic signatures), the brilliant jazz guitarist Ben Monder, and the uber-talented trio of Jason Lindner on keys, Tim Lefebvre on bass and the amazing Mark Guiliana on drums. They infuse Blackstar with a restless anxiety that is particularly evident on “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”. McCaslin’s saxophone stutters over a jittery rhythm with Bowie’s vocals strutting like the half-deranged D.J. from Lodger. The end result is maddening and thrilling.

“Lazarus” is also the title of Bowie’s current musical based on the 1976 film in which he starred, The Man Who Fell to Earth. The track is a stately march with woozy brass over a nimble bass and rigid groove. Bowie’s powerful vocals are bracketed by jagged distorted guitar after every line. Melodically the track is somewhat reminiscent of “Slip Away”, the powerful exploration of loss from 2002’s Heathen. “Lazarus” is the album’s second single, and hopefully some particularly adventurous radio programmers will give it some spins (not likely).

“Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” has a drastically different feel than the original single mix. It has an edgier groove, a much heavier vibe in general, and a savage arrangement. The tension ratchets up notch by notch to a smoldering boil until the cathartic musical freak-outs allow for release before the drama builds yet again. “Girls Love Me” is an eerie, off-kilter track that sounds like it might fit on Bowie’s dark 1995 epic Outside. Bowie’s never been afraid to stretch his voice to the limits—he sounds somewhat deranged here, endlessly repeating “Where the fuck did Monday go?” like a poor impressionable man unhinged by listening to Scary Monsters (and super creeps) for too long and too loud.

“Dollar Days” finds Bowie strumming almost prosaically on an acoustic guitar and singing quite beautifully, but the song quickly turns intense. It has some of the retro-modernism so familiar to Bowie fans—there are endless examples, from “Drive-In Saturday” to “Sons of the Silent Age” to “Slow Burn.” “Dollar Days” is more lush than much of the album, and McCaslin’s sax is white-hot as he flails madly in the background. “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, the album’s upbeat finalé, is built on pulsing synthesizers and tightly-wound percussion. Ben Monder’s searing guitar solo comes in with about two minutes left in the song, swerving like a blazing hot razor while Bowie repeats “I Can’t Give Everything Away” as if acknowledging the inherent mysteries in an album as inscrutable as Blackstar. He may as well be speaking of his entire career… like the sinister ambiguity of “Always Crashing in the Same Car”, the foreboding paranoia of We Are the Dead, or the inscrutable psychosexual meanderings of “The Bewlay Brothers”. It’s never clear where the real David Jones might be hiding in the dense layers of meaning and the numerous personas adopted by David Bowie, and Blackstar is no different. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” seems a rueful admission of what all Bowie fans already know—there are no right answers when listening to Bowie and trying to understand what it’s supposed to be. Once he hands over the master tapes, his part is over and the rest is up to us.

Bowie has released stone-cold classics with three of his last four albums - Heathen (2002), The Next Day (2013) and Blackstar. But as strong as Heathen and The Next Day undoubtedly are, there is a certain safe familiarity to them. Bowie worked with a core of musicians that had been a part of his coterie for many years. With Blackstar, Bowie and Visconti were completely untethered, collaborating with an entirely new group of gifted musicians. The old pros ride the possibilities of their collaborators’ boundless talent to something vast and imposing. Blackstar gets more compelling with each listen, unfolding and expanding in the listeners’ minds—listening to it on headphones is like staring into space, depth perception slowly increasing, the distance between the stars expanding until you are swallowed by endless galaxies.

Blackstar has no reference point—it’s destined to be one itself. It’s trippy and majestic head-music spun from moonage daydreams and made for gliding in and out of life. Although it’s unmistakably Bowie and fits neatly in his catalog, it’s singular in its unique sound and vibe. This is why the world still needs David Bowie—for the unexpected, and the thrill of discovery. Who knows what he might do next? If nothing else, Blackstar is a lesson to us all that we never need stop growing, exploring, lurching in new and challenging directions, as long as we draw breath.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Chris Gerard - 8 January 2016
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It's difficult to separate 2016's Blackstar from The Next Day, the album David Bowie released with little warning in 2013. Arriving after a ten-year drought, The Next Day pulsated with the shock of the new - as Bowie's first album of new material in a decade, how could it not? - but ultimately it was grounded in history, something its cover made plain in its remix of Heroes artwork. Blackstar occasionally recalls parts of Bowie's past - two of its key songs, "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" and "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore," were even aired in 2014 as a supporting single for the Nothing Has Changed compilation (both are revamped for this album) - but Bowie and producer Tony Visconti are unconcerned with weaving winking postmodern tapestries; now that they've shaken free their creative cobwebs, they're ready to explore. Certainly, the luxurious ten-minute sprawl of "Blackstar" - a two-part suite stitched together by string feints and ominous saxophone - suggests Bowie isn't encumbered with commercial aspirations, but Blackstar neither alienates nor does it wander into uncharted territory. For all its odd twists, the album proceeds logically, unfolding with stately purpose and sustaining a dark, glassy shimmer. It is music for the dead of night but not moments of desolation; it's created for the moment when today is over but tomorrow has yet to begin. Fittingly, the music itself is suspended in time, sometimes recalling the hard urban gloss of '70s prog - Bowie's work, yes, but also Roxy Music and, especially, the Scott Walker of Nite Flights - and sometimes evoking the drum'n'bass dabbling of the '90s incarnation of the Thin White Duke, sounds that can still suggest a coming future, but in the context of this album these flourishes are the foundation of a persistent present. This comfort with the now is the most striking thing about Blackstar: it is the sound of a restless artist feeling utterly at ease not only within his own skin but within his own time. To that end, Bowie recruited saxophonist Donny McCaslin and several of his New York cohorts to provide the instrumentation (and drafted disciple James Murphy to contribute percussion on a pair of cuts), a cast that suggests Blackstar goes a bit farther out than it actually does. Cannily front-loaded with its complicated cuts (songs that were not coincidentally also released as teaser singles), Blackstar starts at the fringe and works its way back toward familiar ground, ending with a trio of pop songs dressed in fancy electronics. These don't erase the heaviness of the opening quartet but such a sequencing suggests Blackstar is difficult when the main pleasure of the record is how utterly at ease it all feels: Bowie's joy in emphasizing the art in art-pop is palpable and its elegant, unhurried march resonates deeply.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide



Crooned and wailed over a backdrop of dark jazz, spy soundtrack, and synth pad, Blackstar finds David Bowie—now old enough to be grandpa to a big chunk of the music-streaming public—at the forefront of something. Admittedly, Bowie is a one-man hall of mirrors, and anything new he does ends up reflecting what he’s tried before. Here, it’s certain Berlin outliers (“Beauty And The Beast,” “Red Sails”) and parts of the ’90s concept album Outside, plus his fascinations with Nadsat, the fictional language of A Clockwork Orange, and Scott Walker, the pop star turned avant-garde poet. But even if Bowie’s role as noir storyteller, singing in the first person of jealous losers and lowlifes, isn’t technically a reinvention, it finds him pushing a fringe aesthetic he’s only dallied with before, the result being that he seems more confident about his art than he has been in a long time.

Maybe consistency has something to do with it. Recorded in New York with a local jazz combo for a backing band, Blackstar consists of seven long-ish songs, most of them morbid, all of them suggestive of underworlds. These are spiritual, criminal, and psychosexual underworlds of the pulp imagination, seen in cut-up stories about delinquents (“Girl Loves Me,” written in Nadsat), rejected men “( Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime),” “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore”), and transfiguration (“Lazarus,” “Blackstar”). A lot of the songs are sung from the point of view of the dead or the dying. Having gotten his comeback record—the very inconsistent, sometimes underwhelming The Next Day—out of the way, Bowie is now back to making music as art, and Blackstar is a concept album in everything but name.

In different hands (say, those of Scott Walker, whose morbid experiments seem to be a reference point here), an album of paranoid fragments and subterranean thoughts would be off-putting, but Bowie still has a fantastic voice and an ear for catchy hooks. Ever the interpreter, even with his own work, he belts out what his characters would mutter to themselves, drowning in bass lines and sax solos, the next life glimpsed as a swell of synth strings. Pushing his longstanding interest in theater (“Lazarus” comes from his same-titled musical, “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” is a play on the 17th century tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, and so on) into soundscape, Blackstar uses music as staging and scenery, placing his dynamic voice in the context of noir atmosphere.

On “I Can’t Give Everything Away”—which features sax and guitar solos that are, respectively, too smooth and too busy to be called cool, which makes them cool, because coolness is paradoxical—he hits unexpected emotional notes by simply singing the title over and over. The nearly 10-minute title track starts funereal over skittering beats, before drifting into a pop song as though it were carried up to a cloud. On “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore,” driven by a sax line as insistent as paranoia, he treats the chorus as a whimper. For all its jazz accents and solos, Blackstar ends up becoming a stage for the things that first made Bowie a pop star: his incessantly catchy melodies and elastic voice. With its simple (though oblique) lyrics and endlessly repeated choruses, it’s a secret pop record submerged in the dark places of studio improvisation.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky - Jan 8, 2016
© Copyright 2016 Onion Inc.



Blackstar is the twenty-sixth and final studio album by English musician David Bowie. It was released worldwide through Bowie's ISO Records label on 8 January 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday and two days before his death. The title track was released as a first single on 19 November 2015 and was used as the opening music for the television series The Last Panthers. "Lazarus" was released on 17 December 2015 as a digital download and received its world premiere on BBC Radio 6 Music's Steve Lamacq Show, on the same day. The album was met with critical acclaim and commercial success, reaching the number one spot in a number of countries in the wake of Bowie's death and becoming his first album to reach number one on the Billboard 200 album chart in the U.S.

Like The Next Day, recording of this album took place in secret at The Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios in New York City. Bowie began writing and making demos for songs that appear on Blackstar as soon as sessions for The Next Day concluded. The two songs that appear on Blackstar that were previously released, "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" and "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore", were re-recorded for Blackstar, including new saxophone parts played on the latter song by Donny McCaslin (replacing parts Bowie played on the original release). The title of the latter derives from the title 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, a play by John Ford, an English dramatist of the 17th century. McCaslin and the rest of the jazz group recorded their parts in the studio over a period of about one week a month from January to March 2015, and until later in recording were unaware of Bowie's declining health. The song "Lazarus" was included in Bowie's Off-Broadway musical of the same name.

Blackstar features styles of art rock, experimental rock, and jazz music. According to producer Tony Visconti, it was inspired by rapper Kendrick Lamar with his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly, with electronic duo Boards of Canada and experimental hip-hop trio Death Grips also being cited as influences. Visconti also said that Bowie had planned for it to be his swan song or "parting gift" for his fans before his death, which took place two days after the album's release. As such both Billboard and CNN noted that Bowie's lyrics seem to revolve around his impending death, with CNN noting that the album "reveals a man who appears to be grappling with his own mortality".

The artwork for Blackstar was designed by Jonathan Barnbrook, who had designed the artwork for Bowie's Heathen, Reality, and The Next Day. The CD cover is adorned with a large black star on a plain white background, with the six star segments below the main star forming the word 'B O W I E' in stylized letters. The vinyl cover, in black, features the star as a cutout section, revealing the vinyl (with an all-black picture label) beneath it. It was observed that the Unicode for a black star symbol (★) is U+2605, 26 May being the birthday of Bowie's former guitarist Mick Ronson. It was also observed that a "black star lesion," usually found inside a breast, suggests to medical practitioners evidence of certain types of cancer. This is one of only three Bowie album covers that do not feature his image, the others being the original US pressing of The Man Who Sold the World and the UK release of The Buddha of Suburbia.

Blackstar received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, the album received an average score of 86, which indicates "universal acclaim", based on 39 reviews. Rolling Stone critic David Fricke described the album as "a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing". Andy Gill of The Independent regarded the record as "the most extreme album of his [Bowie's] entire career", stating that "Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop." Reviewing for Q magazine, Tom Doyle wrote "Blackstar is a more concise statement than The Next Day and a far, far more intriguing one." In a favourable review for Exclaim!, Michael Rancic wrote that Blackstar is "a defining statement from someone who isn't interested in living in the past, but rather, for the first time in a while, waiting for everyone else to catch up". The New York Times described the album as "at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans". Pitchfork's review of Blackstar was written on the day of the album's release, two days before Bowie's death, and concluded with the line "This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold."

Blackstar sold 146,000 copies in its first week of sales in the United Kingdom and more than 181,000 in the United States. Within days of the album's release, online retailer Amazon.com temporarily sold out of both the CD and LP editions of the album. In the week 11th January-17th January, Blackstar was the number 1 most downloaded album in 25 iTunes national charts.

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