Pitchfork 85

David Bowie has died many deaths yet he is still with us. He is popular music’s ultimate Lazarus: Just as that Biblical figure was beckoned by Jesus to emerge from his tomb after four days of nothingness, Bowie has put many of his selves to rest over the last half-century, only to rise again with a different guise. This is astounding to watch, but it's more treacherous to live through; following Lazarus’ return, priests plotted to kill him, fearing the power of his story. And imagine actually being such a miracle man—resurrection is a hard act to follow.

Bowie knows all this. He will always have to answer to his epochal work of the 1970s, the decade in which he dictated several strands of popular and experimental culture, when he made reinvention seem as easy as waking up in the morning. Rather than trying to outrun those years, as he did in the '80s and '90s, he is now mining them in a resolutely bizarre way that scoffs at greatest-hits tours, nostalgia, and brainless regurgitation.

His new off-Broadway musical is called Lazarus, and it turns Bowie’s penchant for avatars into an intriguing shell game: The disjointed production features actor Michael C. Hall doing his best impression of Bowie’s corrupted, drunk, and immortal alien from the 1976 art film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Trapped in a set that mimics a Manhattan penthouse, Hall presses himself up to his high skyscraper windows as he sings a new Bowie song also called "Lazarus." "This way or no way, you know, I’ll be free," he sings, smudging his hands against the glass. "Just like that bluebird." Bowie sings the same song on Blackstar, an album that has him clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall.

Following years of troubling silence, Bowie returned to the pop world with 2013’s The Next Day. The goodwill surrounding his return could not overcome the album’s overall sense of stasis, though. Conversely, on Blackstar, he embraces his status as a no-fucks icon, a 68-year-old with "nothing left to lose," as he sings on "Lazarus." The album features a quartet of brand-new collaborators, led by the celebrated modern jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose repertoire includes hard bop as well as skittering Aphex Twin covers. Bowie’s longtime studio wingman Tony Visconti is back as co-producer, bringing along with him some continuity and a sense of history.

Because as much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation is not without precedent in his work. Bowie’s first proper instrument was a saxophone, after all, and as a preteen he looked up to his older half-brother Terry Burns, who exposed him to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Beat Generation ideals. The links connecting Bowie, his brother, and jazz feel significant. Burns suffered from schizophrenia throughout his life; he once tried to kill himself by jumping out of a mental hospital window and eventually committed suicide by putting himself in front of a train in 1985.

Perhaps this helps explain why Bowie has often used jazz and his saxophone not for finger-snapping pep but rather to hint at mystery and unease. It’s there in his close collaborations with avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson, from 1973’s "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)" all the way to 2003’s "Bring Me the Disco King." It’s in his wild squawks on 1993’s "Jump They Say," an ode to Burns. But there is no greater example of the pathos that makes Bowie’s saxophone breathe than on "Subterraneans" from 1977’s Low, one of his most dour (and influential) outré moments. That song uncovered a mood of future nostalgia so lasting that it’s difficult to imagine the existence of an act like Boards of Canada without it. Completing the circle, Boards of Canada were reportedly one of Bowie’s inspirations for Blackstar. At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

Thematically, Blackstar pushes on with the world-weary nihilism that has marked much of his work this century. "It’s a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything," he mused around the release of 2003’s Reality. "It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth." Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. The rollicking "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" gets its name from a controversial 17th-century play in which a man has sex with his sister only to stab her in the heart in the middle of a kiss. Bowie’s twist involves some canny gender-bending ("she punched me like a dude"), a robbery, and World War I, but the gist is the same—humans will always resort to a language of savagery when necessary, no matter where or when. See also: "Girl Loves Me," which has Bowie yelping in the slang originated by A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs.

Though this mix of jazz, malice, and historical role-play is intoxicating, Blackstar becomes whole with its two-song denouement, which balances out the bruises and blood with a couple of salty tears. These are essentially classic David Bowie ballads, laments in which he lets his mask hang just enough for us to see the creases of skin behind it. "Dollar Days" is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. "I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again," he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career. Then, on "I Can’t Give Everything Away," he once again sounds like a frustrated Lazarus, stymied by a returning pulse. This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

David Bowie
Blackstar

[Columbia; 2016]

Rating: 4/5

Drowned In Sound 80

But he also knows the value of making himself scarce: his surprise 2013 comeback album, The Next Day, came after a retreat from the public eye so successful that everyone with any interest in the man either assumed he was at death's door or had been made to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising not to blab that he wasn't at death's door. A stunned public and media freaked out when comeback single ‘Where Are We Now?’ emerged from nowhere, propelling the song into the top ten and The Next Day to the summit of the charts. And for the first time in his life Bowie refused to communicate with the press or public at large, letting other people’s excitement do the heavy lifting: there were expensive videos and archly self-referential artwork to be pored over, but no interviews and not a peep of a live show (this may mean, incidentally, that his live swan song will have been a guest appearance at an Alicia Keys concert in 2006 – a splash anticlimactic, though a ways away from Hanley).

The album got good reviews, and everyone was kind of cool with the fact that the newly enigmatic Bowie was essentially producing the same sort of slightly left-of-centre indie rock that he’d been making before his retirement: The Next Day can kind be seen as the final part of a trilogy that started with 2002’s Heathen and 2003’s Reality (both fine records, by-the-by).

It’s not really a trick you can pull off twice, though, or at least not two years after the last time you did it. The interesting thing about Bowie’s twenty-eighth album Blackstar is that while he’s still refusing to communicate directly, the quality of his silence is very different. It’s a busy silence, from a man who knows that this time he needs to be a bit more available and his music needs to be a bit more enigmatic. Not long after The Next Day came compilation album Nothing Has Changed which came accompanied by the single ‘Sue (Or A Season in Crime)’ and its b-side ’Tis Pity She Was A Whore’, both of which appear here in re-recorded form. The magnificent, ten-minute, eerie jazz epic title song 'Blackstar' came next, accompanied by the sort of lavishly cinematic promo video scarcely made by anyone since the late Nineties. And though there have still been no interviews or live shows, the man next put out a frickin' Broadway musical, Lazarus, in which another Blackstar cut – the gorgeous title song ‘Lazarus’ – received its first airing.

Bowie isn't playing the I AM DAVID BOWIE, MORTALS scarcity card: this time he's letting the music do the talking. And goddammit he’s absolutely pulled it off with his best and most interesting record since Outside.

There has been much talk of Blackstar being a jazz record, and it’s not an entirely inaccurate statement, but it’s worth noting that sax, beats and long songs are not new things for Bowie. What is different is the musicians – a jazz quartet led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin – and the intent. What we have here is atmospheric, eerie, jazz-tinted prog, cradled in the sort of skittering electronic beats that have dropped in and out of his repertoire since Earthling. It sounds like a recipe for total fucking disaster, but in fact it’s wonderful: rock’n’roll has largely been purged, and the resultant musical canvases are melancholic, atmospheric, crepuscular affairs that set Bowie free from the banalities that creep into his pop and unleashes his inner dramatist for the first time in an age – his lyrics and vocals are oblique and otherworldly, freed from the shackles of indie rock.

The song ‘Blackstar’ itself is a simply remarkable piece of work, more so when considered separately from that distracting video. “In the centre of it all, in the centre of it all… your eyes” he half mutters, half whimpers over nervy percussion and marauding squalls of sax, building and transfiguring into sinister, skeletal funk shot through with self-lacerating black humour. It is beautiful, unnerving music, never confrontational, but impossible to second guess, dripping with velvety darkness (deepened by the suggestion from bandmates – plausible – that it’s about the rise of Isis). The rerecorded ‘Sue’ and ‘…Whore’ are both enhanced by slicker, more digestible makeovers that retain their obliqueness but ditch the slightly try-hard Scott Walker-isms of their 2014 incarnations. It brings them more into line with the rest of the record, not least the gorgeous ‘Lazarus’, a comparatively conventional ballad given great weight by Blackstar’s musical palette: huge throbbing sighs of sax and roars of noise, allowed to spiral and growl over seven expansive minutes.

The album would be just tickety boo – and of respectable length – if it ended right there. The last three songs feel like a nice coda: markedly more conventional that what came before if you scrape away the sonic razzle-dazzle, but the razzle-dazzle is there and they possess a poise and drama that The Next Day might have struggled for. ‘Girl Loves Me’ is an aqueous, off-key dirge based around a naggingly hoarse refrain of “where the fuck did Monday go?”, Bowie’s baffled rage twisting a banal phrase into something much more sinister and skin-tingling. And the closing ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ features what sounds like a snatch of ‘A New Career in a New Town’ off Low – rather than being archly self-referential it feels like a warm, kindly note on which to leave things.

I’d love to see David Bowie tour again; I’d love to read an interview with him. And maybe I will. But Blackstar sees him and his band nail a haunting mood – talking would probably spoil it.