The Next Day Review

The Next David

By Paul Taylor

When I saw James Brown perform 13 years ago, he hobbled onstage cocooned in a purple cape. Slowly, he doddered to the mic as the crowd looked on in stunned silence. Of course, the band then kicked in with a massive horn stab as Brown flung off the cape and hollered “Get upah!” and proceeded to do the splits – not bad considering he was 66 at the time. Upon reaching that age earlier this year, David Bowie pulled a similar trick on his fans. Dropping into the Net in the wee hours of his birthday, he released his first new material in nearly 9 years, a single with an album promised shortly after.

The single was “Where are we now?” a mournful and misty-eyed ballad looking back to his fertile years spent in Berlin in the last half of the 70s. On the accompanying video, aside from the usual surrealism's  there is a shot near the end of Bowie looking straight to camera, looking aged and desperate. However, this was a wrong-footer; anyone expecting some sort of sepulchral, valedictory album (like Dylan’s Time out of Mind) is immediately chastised in the album’s title track, the best Bowie opener since the demented “It’s No Game” opened Scary Monsters. In it Bowie hisses “listen!” over whinnying guitars and hyperactive bass, then the chorus: “Here I am, not quite dying, my body left to rot in a hollow tree…” His voice, it must be said, is terrific, even dusting off his metallic Dalekesque shriek at times, as if to prove a point. Rumours of ill health and exhausted retirement are swept away at one fell swoop.

The album that follows cherry-picks from Bowie’s previous career, and not just his untouchable run throughout the 70s (From The Man Who Sold the World to Scary Monsters). Indeed, much of the reviews, including this one, are basically a sign-posting of which new track sounds like which old track.  This is inevitable with an aged legend of Bowie’s stature, but it is also important to note new developments and a way forward.  For Example, “Dirty Boys” continues with familiar lyrical tropes of Bowie’s, with the usual gang of futuristic teenage Droogs, but sonically it feels new, with lopsided saxophone and a lurching rhythm.  Only Earl Slick’s guitar sounds self-referential (including bursts of the famous clanging rhythm motif from “Fame”). Overall it’s one of the most striking songs on the album and Bowie’s croon sounds deliciously sleazy.

Second single “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is amongst my least favourite on the album, probably because it reminds me of one of my least favourite parts of Bowie’s career- his last run of albums which were, until now,  his swan-songs (Hours…., Heathen and Reality). Although respectable and well-received, they trod dangerously close to mediocre at times, and were generally too low-key and melodically flat for my tastes, much like this new track.

“Love is Lost” is a slow-burner based around organ and a chugging keyboard rhythm, again low-key, but more interesting than the previous track. The general feel is quite 80s, especially the guitar fills. On this album I feel Bowie has reached back into his (often derided) 80s and 90s work more than his celebrated 70s classics. It builds through backing vocals to a typically distraught downer from Bowie, “Oh what have you done?”

Then comes the aforementioned “Where are we now?”, sounding like an anomaly now it’s embedded on the album. However, it’s still an amazing song, with Bowie’s vocal and lyric very affecting. I have to voice a certain disappointment that The Next Day is not as this song hinted at, that is a wistful, bittersweet retrospective by a haunted recluse. I suppose we’ve got a while until Bowie has his “Johnny Cash-doing-Hurt” moment.

“Valentine’s Day” is the sweetest and poppiest song on the album and perhaps one of the only ones that might appease casual Bowie buyers who remember teenage heavy petting to “Jean Genie” or “China Girl”. Listening closer to the lyrics, however, you’ll see that rather than a sort-centred confection, it seems to be about a Diamond Dogs style dictator. Sonically it sounds like Bowie aping Suede aping Bowie in some sort of endless post-modern feedback loop, with a classic Bowie vocal and exemplary backing vocals.
Bowie revisits the soundscape of his 1995 album Outside next in “If You Can See Me”, with blistering results. Outside was his last unalloyed masterpiece, and so it’s a welcome return to a skittering breakbeat and a heavily treated vocal with apocalyptic, deranged lyrics that build and build until the track detonates into a howl of feedback and keening electro whale calls. Stunning.

“I’d Rather Be High” has the narrative of a soldier dreaming of chemical escape, and in that respect it most resembles Bowie’s early narrative songs circa Space Oddity. The melody and instrumentation are also strongly redolent of the 60s and his early career. It provides a welcome and knowing reach back into his distant past, and a spot-on pastiche of 60s pop in general, with a middle eight straight out of pre-Tommy Who.

After some pleasant but mediocre filler with “Boss of Me”, the album continues with “Dancing Out in Space”, another of my favourites. After some gorgeously woozy, My Bloody Valentine-style synths in the verses, the tracks segues into a brisk foxtrot for the faintly absurd chorus.

This kind of surreal mash-up continues in the next track “How Does the Grass Grow?” which edges even closer to the sublime/ ridiculous borderline, especially in the fact that the bridge consists of Bowie singing the famous guitar melody from The Shadows’ “Apache” in a Doo-Wop style. I still can’t decide if that’s genius or just plain silly, but the audacity of it can only be applauded.

“Set the World on Fire” may be a grower, but I have to say I find the whiff of 80s soft Metal (specifically Tin) that pervades it immediately off-putting. Lyrically it is unremarkable except for a reference to Dylan and Dave Van Ronk.

“You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” is the kind of desperate torch-ballad album closer Bowie wrote the book on, and you know instantly you are in the hands of a master. He makes the soaring melody look effortless, with seemingly no loss in the range or power of his voice. This track then ends with the most explicit reference to his past (apart from that incredible PhotoShopped album cover), when the drums break out into the beat that opens “Five Years”.

As a coda, we get “Heat” which encroaches on  Scott Walker territory- both the 60s pop God and the abstruse later incarnation. The burbling bassline also recalls the songs Bowie provided for the Labyrinth soundtrack. Around the mid-point mark, some beautiful, slightly off key strings come in, as Bowie repeatedly calls out the line “My Father and the prison..” and the whole thing finishes with strummed 12-string acoustic guitar.

The Next Day, then, is a decisive and meticulous instrument of re-assertion, possibly born of frustration at those rumours I mentioned earlier of Bowie’s decline and isolation. It reveals a man still, in his late 60s, at the centre of the maelstrom of modern life and still as seeking and restless as ever. It also does not sound like an ending, but the beginning of a new chapter and it poses an exciting question on where Bowie goes from here, having unquestionably proven himself as capable and relevant. In the meantime, it’s great to have him back.

  Paul Taylor, March 2013