Music icon David Bowie this year released his first album in 10 years.
Recorded with long time
collaborator Tony Visconti the album, “The Next Day”, was Bowie’s 30th
studio recording.
“The Next Day” debuted at #1 on the NZ Album Charts when it was released
in March. Album features the original 14 track album and a second CD containing
the 3 deluxe tracks, 4 new studio tracks, a Japanese bonus track and 2 new
remixes including ‘Love Is Lost’ (Hello
Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy for the DFA). The re-pack will also contain an
extra DVD containing the 4 video clips released to date from the album.
Review
Say this for David Bowie: he has a flair for drama. This abiding love of the
theatrical may not be as evident in the production of The Next Day as it is in
its presentation, how Bowie sprung it upon the world early in 2013 following a
decade of undeclared retirement. Reasons for Bowie's absence were many and few,
perhaps related to a health scare in 2004, perhaps due to a creative dry spell,
perhaps he simply didn't have songs to sing, or perhaps he had a lingering
suspicion that by the time the new millennium was getting into full swing he was
starting to be taken for granted. He had settled into a productive purple patch
in the late ‘90s, a development that was roundly ignored by all except the
devoted and the press, who didn't just give Hours, Heathen, and Reality a pass,
they recognized them as a strong third act in a storied career. That same
sentiment applies to The Next Day, an album recorded with largely the same team
as Reality – the same musicians and the same producer, his longtime
lieutenant Tony Visconti – and, appropriately, shares much of the same moody,
meditative sound as its predecessor Heathen. What's different is the reception,
which is appropriately breathless because Bowie has been gone so long we all
know what we've missed. And The Next Day is designed to remind us all of why
we've missed him, containing hints of the Thin White Duke and Ziggy Stardust
within what is largely an elegant, considered evocation of the Berlin Bowie so
calculating it opens with a reworking of “Beauty & The Beast,” and is
housed in an artful desecration of the Heroes LP cover. Unlike his Berlin
trilogy of the late '70s, The Next Day is rarely unsettling. Apart from the
crawling closer “Heat” – a quiet, shimmering, hallucination-channeling
late-’70s Scott Walker – the album has been systematically stripped of
eeriness, trading discomfort for pleasure at every turn. And pleasure it does
deliver, as nobody knows how to do classic Bowie like Bowie and Visconti, the
two life-long collaborators sifting through their past, picking elements that
relate to what Bowie is now: an elder statesman who made a conscious decision to
leave innovation behind long ago. This persistent, well-manicured nostalgia
could account for the startling warmth that exudes from The Next Day; even when
a melody sighs with an air of resigned melancholia, as it does on “Where Are
We Now?,” it never delves into sadness, it stays afloat in a warm, soothing
bath. That overwhelming familiarity is naturally quite appealing for anyone
well-versed in Bowie lore, but The Next Day isn't a career capper; it lacks the
ambition to be anything so grand. The Next Day neither enhances nor diminishes
anything that came before, it's merely a sweet coda to a towering career.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine- AllMusic