I woke up this morning to the news that David Bowie is dead. It had never occurred to me that he would mean enough to me that his death would come as a shock; but on reflection I can see that he was such a pervasive force in music that even an unreconstructed, unrepentant rock'n'roller such as myself was greatly influenced by him. So out of love and respect I gave his new, and last, album a listen.
1. "Blackstar" 9:57
2. "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" 4:52
3. "Lazarus" 6:22
4. "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" 4:40
5. "Girl Loves Me" 4:51
6. "Dollar Days" 4:44
7. "I Can't Give Everything Away" 5:47
It's full of his absolutely unique voice of course, sometimes pure, sometimes distorted electronically. Here are strange sonic landscapes recorded on alien worlds so distant from our solar system that life itself there would be unrecognizable as such, nor we to it. Very little of this could be described as "straight ahead"; in fact as far as rhythm and tempo goes this album is deliberate madness. It's experimental music in places where he begins a line of verse on 1 a couple times, then begins one on 4 just to fuck with your head. Often the time of the vocals and the time of the music have no relation to each other, disconnected except perhaps in key signature. The title track is the worst, and therefore the most disturbing.
The last song is haunting. Haunting, I tell you. It has to be deliberate. He must have know he was a dead man recording. So the last song on his last album was designed to haunt those who heard it. It is a ghost singing to us of regret. And he's right, he can't. But he did give us this. I guess it will have to do.
http://www.discogs.com/master/939598
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