7 - Diamond Dogs

Like all good method actors, Bowie found out that becoming the character drains you of your actual real-life personality. It's time to not be Ziggy anymore, but the nose candy isn't just an extravagant indulgence anymore either. Welp, time to fire the Spiders, set Orwell's 1984 to music and call it Diamond Dogs (i'm skipping Pin Ups because it's a cover album).

Orwell's estate wouldn't let him actually stage it as a musical, so he just reverted to his own post-apocalyptic version of everything. Thank goodness for the paranoia and anorexia of cocaine addiction, gives it that realistic touch you can't get anywhere else.

Everyone points out that this is his last glam rock album, but remember he's just moving with the trends and putting his stamp on it. But, like he's been doing all along, he's imagining a world in the near future that he doesn't want to be a part of and then going a different direction. Right now he's still in his Rolling Stones phase and he's about to go Soul while everybody else goes punk.

But i'm getting ahead again. This is more great, now super trashy, rock and roll. Some say that's cause Bowie isn't as good a lead guitarist as Mick Ronson. I disagree, it's 'cause he's coked to the gills and he's watching himself be the rockstar casualty he started scripting 7 years ago. This is the part of the movie where he hits rock bottom so that he can vanish for a while and "recover."

I'm not making that up, by the way, it's track 7, Rock 'n' Roll With Me.

Now more than ever, he's very clearly writing these songs and singing them at himself, then living them out. I love this album, but we've reached the second sticking point in my familiarity with Bowie. The next few albums are uncharted territory for me, and i really don't know what to expect. I do know they lead to the 90s Bowie that i didn't much care for as a teenager. Guess we'll see how that plays out.

8 - Young Americans

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more