By Max Hill
The Next Day is reminiscent of David Bowie’s golden days
The successful rock and roll comeback is a rare and serendipitous thing — after 10 years of absence from the music scene, and 20 years previous making middle-of-the-road art rock, many had considered Bowie’s career to be over, and had begun to consider his suc- cesses and failures in the past tense. That The Next Day exists at all, recorded in secret and announced only two months before its release, is astound- ing; that it manages to rise to the level of Bowie’s best work from the 70s is a revelation.
But this it accomplishes: The Next Day is dark, terse, and at times inaccessible, but it also features some of Bowie’s most challenging, creative and ulti- mately rewarding work, as well as some of his most infectious and involving. The David Bowie we hear on The Next Day has weathered the storm and has come out both stronger and stranger for the experience.
Still as chameleonic and charmingly contradictory as he’s always been, Bowie experi- ments with a wide variety of influences throughout the album’s 14 tracks: from the claustrophobic, Joy Division post-punk of album opener “The Next Day”, to the Smiths-inspired anti- war balladry of “I’d Rather Be High”, to the dancehall beat of “Dancing Out in Space”, Bowie gleefully dips his toes in a wide variety of genres and styles, and yet manages to make this musical collage into something dis- tinctly his own.
His vocals are just as varied: on tracks like “Where Are We Now?” and “Heat”, each of Bow- ie’s 66 years come through in his low, fragile warble, while the youthful chirp heard in “Valentine’s Day” and the sultry snarl of “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” sound as though they could’ve been recorded during Bowie’s golden years.
The Next Day is not without its flaws, of course: the al- bum’s musical diversity robs it of the singularity and oneness that defined Ziggy Stardust and Low, and the album’s opening and closing sections under- whelm compared to its spectac- ular middle section.
However, the album has a certain quality that Bowie has never fully perfected until now. Whereas the greatness of albums like Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station come from Bowie’s remarkable talent for performance and character, and his Berlin period is most notable for Bowie’s openness and artistic honesty, The Next Day manages to balance Bowie’s dichotomized selves — the mask and the man behind it — better than any of his previous works.
This isn’t to say that the album relies too heavily on self- reflection: given the cover, which is identical to Bowie’s 1977 effort Heroes save for a large white box in the middle which obscures his face, it’s easy to see why many anticipated an album in which Bowie would try to summarize his career and find some form of closure. The Next Day isn’t the album we were expecting: it’s almost defiantly difficult to pin down, and like Bowie’s best work, it leaves its listeners confused, exhilarated, and intrigued.
So many “comebacks” find washed-up artists desperately trying to recycle the chemical formula which once made them great. On The Next Day, Bowie always has something new to say, and it comes through in the album’s charismatic performances and unwillingness to re-tread familiar ground. Whether Bowie will make an- other LP is difficult to say — though long-time collaborator and album producer Tony Visconti has hinted at studio dates later this year, nothing seems set in stone — but with The Next Day, Bowie has solidified his relevance for many years to come, and reassured his fans and casual listeners alike that his talent for reinvention and seemingly boundless creativity has not weakened with age.
