Album Review: David Bowie - The Next Day

Frankly, I never thought I would review a new Bowie album in my lifetime (or his either, but that much is self-evident). The Next Day is a rear-view mirror; looking back at Bowie isn't an exercise in judging a man so much as it is the judgment of what the man took from his collaborators - the Corinthians, the chameleons, the caricatures; like he said in 1971. Visconti produced it, Earl Slick set down the guitars, Sterling Campbell on drums.

The Next Day visits Berlin - Bowie told us it would in Where Are We Now, that first single, and he sounds out in concluder Heat. Lodger - Bowie's most enigmatic, conflicted, and misunderstood record - is the closest comparison to The Next Day; we catch him as “a man lost in time”, but perhaps he catches us – there is little effort for glamour; Bowie is instead disarmed, almost senile, geriatric, and he's afraid of it in The Stars (Are Out Tonight). There are clumsy lyrics, and the accidental brilliance of Heroes and Low has abdicated, leaving us a black and white souvenir on the album's cover. Bowie isn't a star so much as a red giant; loud, large, bright, but dying, and he knows it - the absence from touring, the convalescence, his seemingly indefinite hermitage being his terms of surrender.

The Next Day is a clumsy, hairy record; but with a vital and brilliant intelligence. Bowie naked is what we wanted all along.