To say that David Bowie’s final album was coloured by his death two days after its release, and the revelation that he recorded it beneath the terminal shadow of cancer, would be an understatement. It was flooded by it. Few albums have ever been subjected to so much exegesis so quickly. Was the central image, coming from the author of Starman and multiple ruminations on stardom, an act of self-erasure? Were the lyrics of Lazarus (“Look up here, I’m in heaven”) not just a reference to the lead character in Bowie’s confounding stage musical, an alien trapped in a Manhattan purgatory between life and death, but a loaded farewell? And what about those allusions to Elvis, Aleister Crowley, cosmology and the villa of Ormen? What did it all mean? One thing is certain. Regardless of the circumstances or the rune-reading, Blackstar ranks among Bowie’s very best albums.

Blackstar is a self-contained world. Despite drawing inspiration from recent albums by D’Angelo and Kendrick Lamar, and featuring percussion from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, it never strains to be of-the-moment like his 90s albums Outside and Earthling. Nor does it reference Bowie’s past as blatantly as his 2013 comeback The Next Day. Instead, he struck out for the fringes, the dark corners, the shadowlands, looking for one last new way to be David Bowie — one final incandescent flare of creativity.



David Bowie: Blackstar review – a spellbinding break with his past Read more

Bowie was always a consummate collaborator who sought out great players to facilitate each transition. Saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s forward-thinking jazz band, especially the extraordinary drummer Mark Guiliana, enabled him to go in several directions at once. The song Blackstar opens like a black mass, with an incense-whiff of dread, fades into the gloaming, re-emerges as a torch song, twists into a funk chant and loops back to the first section with twice the power. It’s as commandingly ambitious a composition as Station to Station, the title track of the album with which Blackstar shares the most DNA.

Like Station to Station, Blackstar is an inky labyrinth of human cruelty and frailty shot through with moments of grace and transcendence, and obsessed with different kinds of transformation. And it’s another record on which each song carves out its own unique space, with no room for repetitions or redundancies. Even Bowie’s voice never does the same thing twice. It’s haunted, wired, seductive, menacing, mischievous, kind: a final multifaceted performance from pop’s great actor.

There is panic and brutality in the surly nadsat paranoia of Girl Loves Me; the murderous sexual jealousy of febrile drum’n’bass psychodrama Sue (Or in a Season of Crime); and the cackling vulgarity of ’Tis Pity She Was a Whore, a century-hopping fable of sex and violence. Then there are songs of liberation and transmogrification. On Lazarus, death becomes a kind of freedom. Dollar Days is an expat’s farewell to “the English evergreens” and a plea for more time. I Can’t Give Everything Away pivots on the title’s poignant double meaning: a refusal to explain himself and a reluctance to let go. The wistful harmonica nods to A New Career in a New Town from Low, while McCaslin’s saxophone, often an agent of chaos, becomes a means of elevation, sending the record spiraling into the sky, out of view.

“I know something is very wrong,” Bowie sings on the final track, and indeed it was, but then he was always fascinated by lives wrenched out of joint. And long before he was ill, he was preoccupied with death: the looming darkness that makes the light so much brighter. In 2002, Interview magazine editor Ingrid Sischy asked Bowie what he felt the point of art was. “It’s a head-spinning dichotomy — of the lust for life against the finality of everything,” he replied. “It’s those two things raging against each other, you know? And that produces these moments that feel like real truth … That is the entire story, right there. That’s it. There’s no more to be said.” Blackstar says it beautifully.