Blackstar by David Bowie

Cancer, chaotic jazz, Kubrick, fractures in time, homosexual code languages, Norse towns and Reddit. What do these have in common? Not much other than constituting Bowie’s bag of tricks on his final, sober, innuendo laden album, covering all this and more in just 7 songs.

The Event Horizon

Later period Bowie is my favorite. After triple dipping in metal, techno, and avant garde through the early and mid 90's, Mr. Bowie returned to glistening and familiar grooves on 'Hours' (1999), the brooding, paranoid, slightly more experimental rock & soul of 'Heathen' (2002), to the uptempo exuberance of 'Reality' (2003), Bowie improved his game with each release, congealing invention and expectation; adherent to various limbs of various zeitgeists with lyrical and musical integrity never in question. Then...cut to black.

By all appearances David Bowie departed planet Earth. Following a heart attack on stage (on a tour which he and the band struck up the new single 'Never Get Old' nightly), he cancelled all remaining dates, never returning. No new music. No interviews.

Years elapsed. The assumption that the tireless star's sudden and sustained absence from public life signaled his professional retirement from as well. 

With a bang, after 9 years a single emerged with an official release date announcement for a new Bowie LP; 'The Next Day' felt like the spiritual successor to 'Reality'. All vigor and sensibility intact from his previous work with the same band. Still no tours announced, and though Bowie would never return to touring, it felt he was again, in a long career marked with rebirths, reborn. Even the album title felt as though we were on the header of a freshly turned page.

Through all the late era opuses and seasoned disdain for revisitation, nothing prepped the public for what David Bowie began working on only a year later in 2014.

Blackstar

In November 2015, a sprawling 10 minute single arrived with no warning, again accompanied by an album release date. 'Blackstar' instantly forebodes in the opening moments, dislodging the listener from any sense of comfort or levity. As a Radiohead drum stutter begins grooving Bowie delivers his lead vocal, accompanied by a thin perfect 5th automaton duet, with grim solemnity. It's as though Bowie's new guise is that of a zombie alien crooner. As the multi stage composition progresses further into an experimental wilderness of middle eastern flare,

mysterious revelation and prattling saxophone, teetering on alt jazz cacophony, background vocals writhe ghoulishly like howling black clouds - the wrath of some unearthly season. Then from the distance, heavenly sounds approach as the song lifts the listener's gaze above the blackness to harps, orchestral synth, and Bowie describing the events on the day of some unspecified character's demise: "Something happened on the day he died/ spirit  rose a meter and stepped aside/ somebody else took his place and bravely cried/ 'I'm a black star I'm a black star'. Melodically this section is practically a separate song, an utterly different locale, but quickly invaded by the menacing duet from the opening sequence in a call and response with Bowie's lead melody, coaxing it back into subterranean murk. We find ourselves in the envoi, now marching rather than stuttering, to the thematic establishment of Blackstar several minutes earlier. The song culminates slowing, degenerating, perhaps imploding in on itself...in enigmatic drones, electronic blips and pan flute gibberish. The title track becomes more stunning and hauntingly floral upon repeated listening. After a year, I still can't get enough. The queasy harmonic minor, haunting incantations, and the otherworldly tenor of the piece as a whole are close to my heart. Replacement of Bowie's stellar troupe of stage/studio musicians of the past 20 odd years with Donny McCaslin and his exploratory jazz quartet from NYC really gave this piece and the all that follow a zest unheard before Blackstar. 

The remainder of this album is an exciting dirge - Mcaslin and his quartet birth more alien landscape for a listener to explore and feast their mystification on. 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore' is an unbridled shot in the arm - or another male extremity if one heeds the lyrics. Sax's wail and honk, drums thump and drive, as Bowie channels the troubled character in question, tongue planted firmly in falsetto resonating cheek. You'll chuckle and be appalled at the same time as the song halts amid offputting shrieks of pain and reverie. 'Lazarus', which doubles as the title piece of the musical David Bowie was intimately involved with until just before his death, describes just that. "Look up here, I'm in heaven" he nudges. 'Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)' is a drugged, swerving experience that ends with a crash. 'I'm such a fool, right from the start, you went with that clown'...the song seems to allude to health problems, crime and domestic aspirations, though it's true meaning is unclear. And that's okay. Bowie isn't shy with head scratchers. Case in point, 'Girl Loves Me' which is substantiated lyrically with a homosexual spoken code from the 1800's called Polari and words from the fictional language of the future from 'A Clockwork Orange' called Nadsat. 

This marks the recurrence of a running theme throughout Bowie's career: stirring disparate time periods together. Musically, lyrically, the man was fascinated by time periods, factual and fictional. Impossible futures, fantastic alternate realities and cultural history were all ripe for his plucking. 'Dollar Days' and 'I Can't Give Everything Away' close the album off in a seamless one-two lamenting punch. The former profiles the mindset of an individual soberly approaching mortality to the tune of sighing piano and street-shuffling rhythm. Bowie's voice lilts within the caress of the hired jazz masters' pinache. This is a fantastic song. Finally, the album concludes with a wink as the beat picks up one last time, a faraway harmonica calls for the singer to take his post, and he does so by lifting the tag right out of 'They Long to Be (Close to You)', another Bowie trademark. And as he repeats the song title in the closing chorus, we ride the unmistakable long wave that is the beloved star's vibrato one last time. 

Through all the varied territory explored in Blackstar, there is so much imagery alluding to mortality and finality that it was immediately clear when the singer passed away just a couple days after the release that he had written this album to coincide with the event. Only you, Bowie. Well done. 

My only problem with this Collection is that it was too short. Yes, the title track is 10 minutes long, and the album does clock in at a perfectly satisfactory 41 minutes, but when an artist is on a roll breaking new ground I find I always want more. Of course consolation is found in the Lazarus cast recordings which find three further songs from the Blackstar period, capped off the album by all implications to buoy the musical's soundtrack release. The deluxe version of the album contains a

second disc on which Bowie himself performs these three songs with the black star band. I've picked up this collection in mixed the three tracks into the Blackstar album. If you're like me and Blackstar felt abbreviated, if the addition of these, Bowie's last known recordings, certainly makes it feel complete.

AMUSED: 80%

ABUSED: 20%