David Bowie passed away on the 10th January, after having fought against cancer for 18-months. This article was written a day before his death.
Not only did he celebrate his 69th birthday last Saturday, David Bowie also released his new album intriguingly named ‘ ★’, or Blackstar. Just two years after The Next Day, this new creation comes with its own themes and indeed its individual creature to add to the artist’s collection, quickly giving Bowie yet another reason to celebrate: it has only taken the album two days to reach the top of Amazon’s UK best-selling list, in front of Adele, with the vinyl equally in the top 10.
But this is as far as the festive mood goes. The album has more in common with the haunting sounds of Outside (1995) than with the hopeful messages of tracks such as ‘Dancing Out in Space’ from The Next Day.
David Bowie’s extremely versatile voice is backed up by drums beating irregular but ominously present rhythms and disharmonious strings, giving birth to an atmosphere that makes the expression “angsty” seem hollow altogether. ‘Girl loves me’, the ï¬fth of this slightlyshorter-than-usual seven track album, is particularly obscure both in terms of musical choices and the lyrics themselves, and goes to show how electronic sounds can be used to complement acoustic instruments in a subtle balance. Most of the lyrics of this song, like “Party up moodge, nanti vellocet round on Tuesday”, are based on a mix of slang and made-up languages, using Bowie’s voice as a separate instrument in itself as he continues experimenting with combinations of echoes, dissonance and phrases with surprisingly high-pitched cry-like ends. Mostly made up of three distinct parts like ‘Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)’ – which evolves from a rocky intro with a bit of a funk tang into dark jazz featuring long solos of the artist’s favourite instrument, the saxophone, progressing towards a more expansive style at the end – this album’s songs play with the absence of sound as much as its presence. Liberated of any pretence of commercial interest, the artist is able to write slightly longer tracks and therefore give more importance to every sound and switch of tone that might strike the listener as out of place.
Easily recognisable as part of David Bowie’s long discography, Blackstar remains nonetheless a symbolic step further into experimentation, both musically and aesthetically, with the rather disturbing music videos for ‘Lazarus’ and ‘Blackstar’ directed by Swedish ï¬lm director Bo Johan Renck and the cryptic design of the album cover.
