David Bowie - Reality on CD

Description

Youth, as the old adage goes, is wasted on the young, although surely Reality highlights the ambiguously chameleonic and now comfortably middle-aged David Bowie as an honourable exception to the rule, a man whose soul and creative metre endures to pursue eternal youth within the accelerating self-awareness of his own mortality. Times were when he'd never get away with it. In recent years Bowie has had a frustrating tendency to handle his own past with varying degrees of bemusement--whether to suffer it, stroke it, spit on it or merely borrow from it (some of Reality's best tracks, the quasi-political "Fall Dog Bomb the Moon" and the electronic punk of "New Killer Star", both shadow his past while exploring the neurosis of our post-9/11 world) while, in a manner most unbecoming of one of rock's most eminent pace-makers, he's chased juvenescent pop fads like some Botox-injecting fashionista. However, Reality, much like its immediate predecessor, the highly-regarded Heathen (Tony Visconti remains at the production helm), finds Bowie reacclimatising to his muse and his life--both as an Englishman in New York and as a doomed rider on the proverbial storm of existence--just beautifully. There are home truths and cognitive mirror gazes on the title track, a sleazy roughed-up diamond with Johnny Rotten-ish cackles and squawky guitars on which he casts a conciliatory glance towards his previous rock & roll personae and despairs at how he "hid amongst the junk of wretched highs" whereas the equally excellent and morbidly cheery "Never Get Old" (musically, imagine a more flippantly sing-along "Sound and Vision") is as comically fatalistic as a two-fingered salute from a retirement home window. Despite cracking a wicked smile on a rampant strut through Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso", Reality favours brooding philosophising over light-hearted chuckles--see "Looking for Water", the dramatic grand piano and images of dislocated metropolitan topography on the 'Loneliest Guy" and the sullen dying breath of "Bring Me the Disco King"--but Bowie admits to being just like the rest of us in not having the answers. Still, Reality consolidates Bowie's artistic rehabilitation and ranks as another fine album from a man still willing to ask questions of himself. Each David Bowie album from Black Tie White Noise onwards has been greeted with a huge puff of publicity but very little aftertaste. This is as much our fault as his. In our long-established immediacy culture, unless you are repeatedly whacked around the head by something, it evaporates. The complex and distant music Bowie has produced over the past ten years often demands the one thing we don't have in abundance today: time. To underline the importance of his recent oeuvre, Bowie played Heathen in a block, as if to say; this is really special, bear with it. With that in mind, I'm delighted to report that his 25th studio album, Reality is among his very best works, and this is being written not in the exhilarating judgement-numb of a long-in-advance copy. This is after living with it. Its rock music, for sure; it travels along similar lines to Heathen and Hours..., but it has a real freshness and accessibility and, in this era of ever-extending CDs, it's a proper album; clocking in at under 50 minutes. Working with Tony Visconti again has certainly given energy to Bowie and working in Visconti's small studio in New York brings the work a real freshness and intimacy. With his regular players Sterling Campbell, Gail Ann Dorsey and Mike Garson; and with Visconti playing his economical and often underrated bass, there is a beautiful lustre to the sound which manages to embrace innovation in a most organic manner. 'New Killer Star', freely referencing his own 'TVC 15', is an effortless overture that plays to the highlights of the Visconti/Bowie partnership. 

Tracks:

1. New Killer Star
2. Pablo Picasso
3. Never Get Old
4. The Loneliest Guy
5. Looking For Water
6. She'll Drive The Big Car
7. Days
8. Fall Dog Bombs The Moon
9. Try Some, Buy Some
10. Reality
11. Bring Me The Disco King