Review: David Bowie – The Next Day Mar 02, 2013

Mr Bowie, you bastard son of a bitch. How dare you leave me in the wilderness? I’ve stumbled upon a house made of sweets after being thrust into the forest by the proverbial stepmother, only there were no bread crumbs to find the way home; nothing but a trail of lightweight morsels that blew away with the wind…

David Bowie will survive the train that’s headed towards his entire body of work at the speed of light – but if ever there was an album to polarise the opinions of those who want to love, those who want to hate, those who want to be cool, those who will take the opposite stance to be alternatively cool, The Next Day is it. If you want this album to stand a chance in your life, my advice to you would be: abandon any critical assault on it – including this one – and let with your ears connect to your heart.

Some years back, the release of Heathen couldn’t have come soon enough for me. The release of The Next Day however has come as something of a surprise to everybody unless you had your ear very, very close to the ground perhaps. As something of a sporadic but loyal Bowie fan who would go so far as to proclaim Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars as the finest album ever made but in the same breath, run anything with the name of Tin Machine on it into the ground and leave everything in between up for grabs depending on the mood of the day, this is going to be interesting.

My first pass at it is without a pen. My first pass is conducted standing in my kitchen. I need to know if I want to dance. I need to figure out if I should windmill a guitar at any point. The kitchen is where the magic happens. The kitchen is also where the tissues are if I feel the need to cry. So far, I’ve avoided all that’s been said about it – even the comments that Tony Visconti made to Rolling Stone. I don’t even know who’s in the band. Under normal circumstances, not knowing the finer details would grate, but right now, all I want to know is where this trip is going to take me.

The Next Day is both high and low at the same time. I don’t know what to make of it. There’s nothing to hold onto. Nothing stands out bar the ‘single’ that I’ve heard on the radio. I want to dance. I want to stand still and listen. Desperately, my analogue brain searches for a comparison to something Bowie has shown me before but it’s not happening. If this was a new band, I could possibly abandon it but time has served me well and taught me that Bowie is worth hanging around while he takes his clothes off.

Second time around – then the third – this is more like it. The title track becomes more familiar. I recognise this Bowie as the frenetic, urgent artist that he sometimes used to be. Dirty Boys takes me somewhere else entirely, shit – it sounds almost like The Doors on some odd drug that hadn’t been thought of back in the 60s. It’s becoming apparent that there is either no rhyme or reason to The Next Day – or there is every reason.

Bowie is painting and sculpting not recording. It’s an album to experience rather than listen to in the car. We’re in a relationship already. A one-way relationship in which I am preoccupied with trying to work out the ways in which I love you, the places you will take me – and you don’t care. You are what you are. I’m the one who must take or leave it. She demands I listen to her from start to finish. This is old school and I’m falling deeper the closer we move into each other.

Second base. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) and Love Is Lost – they live together locked in a room. It’s all I can do to keep myself from whipping back the curtain to see what kind of majick is at play here. Love Is Lost has the most simple, hypnotic drum sound. Trent Reznor is rolling in a grave he’s still digging for himself and I want to listen to the song again but I won’t. I must let the story play out to the end.

I wish I had never heard Where Are We Now. I want it to be part of the experience but instead, it feels like we were walking in the park and she whispered in my ear that we had passed by her old boyfriend. Where Are We Now is finely groomed, strong and rich. I feel inadequate. I know him from somewhere and I don’t want to even though he’s a really nice guy. I can handle this because Valentine’s Day is more beautiful than he will ever be. I shall claim this territory as my own instead.

Now I want to dance. Dance, sing in tongues and all the other behaviours that the best of Bowie brings out in me. More than anything, I wish I had written this song but I am not jealous. If I didn’t want to dance, I would cry and dancing feels like what I should do.

I’m lost within the story now and the mood changes abruptly taking my mood with it. I don’t like this. Maybe I will grow to love this particular dress, but not today. I was somewhere I didn’t want to be taken from. She apologises. It’s fine. I understand, really I do. We move into a slow entrancement that reminds me of somebody I used to know but her name escapes me – she’s certainly not you – drowned in a saxophone that intrudes for reasons that I can’t quite fathom.

She offers to take me places I’ve not been to for the longest time. I find myself swinging with the boys in a warehouse west of Moscow. I find myself bearing down a mountain at speed. I’m Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. I am the world and then, as I come to the realisation that I cannot possibly swab up all she has to offer over the course of a mere quarter of an entire day in bed with her, I am not the world. I am anything but.

The realisation that she will be leaving soon is awful. I feel sick with the thought that I might have to rejoin a world in which a woman like this barely exists. I know I will hunt for her day and night. Other girls I meet will not be holding candles.

If some of this comes over as immature, I am so sorry. I’ve been taken to every conceivable point in my musical education and fallen in love with something bigger, more exotic and positively frightening than I ever expected it to be. With ‘the woman’ who has laid her entire past out before me in such a way that I’ll never be able to look another in the eye.

Le Roi Est Mort. Vive Le Roi.

Sigh.

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