Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Creem APRIL 1977 - by Billy Altman

BOWIE ON THE BRINK: WAITING FOR THE GIFT OF SOUND AND VISION

David Bowie: Low

In a career that has shown him to be perhaps the most successful graduate of the Evelyn Wood Genre Dynamics Institute, David Bowie has demonstrated that he can live uptown, downtown and all around. His track record to date shows only two real instances of failing to come up with the unexpected: Pin Ups, a weak-kneed attempt to stall for time after finally popping the top off the American market with Aladdin Sane thinly veiled as a solidarity maneuver with the up and coming punk scene; and Station To Station, a perfectly explainable bonus ball after lighting up the hit machine with Fame. And though there have been roughly an equal number of strikes and gutter balls down the path, Bowie's bumblebeeing amidst the flowers of inspiration has been, at the very least, admirable. Were one looking for a thread of consistency with which to label him, one would have to pull on the one marked willingness to experiment. For better or worse, he hasn't been afraid to try and that confidence has been, one supposes, one of the primary factors involved in making him one of the most interesting (if not always enjoyable) figures in '70s pop.

If one delves in search of trends within Bowie's work overe the past few years, the most obvious one is certainly the subordination of the words to the music, a conscious move that began after the overblown prophetics of Diamond Dogs. I remember seeing Bowie on Dinah! (!), moving into a trance with the mesmerizing rhythms of Fascination, the lyrics and vocals functioning solely as nuances bouncing off the sweaty soul textures. I realized then that if Bowie had wished to, he could easily have become a Robert Palmer, except that, let's face it, Bowie's got the charisma and Palmer equates on that scale to a mannequin in Bloomingdale's window. To spend the rest of the time as a soul stirrer would probably have been a good and safe move, and with Station To Station I was beginning to believe that such was the case.

Low, however, destroys that notion with a resounding crush. It's as unaccessible an effort as Bowie has ever produced and its uniqueness (and that's not necessarily a compliment) is rather confounding. Although Bowie has utilized his image, rather than his actual music, to enhance his outreness in the past, Low finds him in a state of unrest that carries its problems on its sleeve aurally. To begin with, only two of the eleven tracks could be really classified as "songs": Be My Wife and Speed Of Life, the latter being one of three instrumentals on the record. Instead, we're given fragments to munch on, pieces that come across as technological landscapes to be filled in by our own imaginations. There is also little continuity between the tracks; seven short to medium timed cuts on side one backed by a second side dominated by two fairly long meanderings.. And the barriers, even for the usually cold and distanced Bowie, are thick and complex. Cased in point: Breaking Glass, whose lyrics run thusly - "Baby, I've been breaking glass in your room again / Don't look at the carpet, I've thrown something awful on it / You're such a wonderful person, but you've got problems / Let me touch you." Try humming that one next time you're in the shower.

Within the swirl of electronics (Eno is all over this record and believe me, his presence is felt quite heavily), what comes across most is an impression of sensory overload and a feeling of beiong on the brink with nowhere to turn. Speed Of Life, with its Telstarian Endless Summer post surf pulsations, the Silver Convention/Andra True Connections of Sound And Vision; the smoke filled back room beat generation inherent in Bowie's sax solo on Subterraneans; the tribal rites flavor of the xylophone/vibes percussion laden Weeping Wall; and the stark Bowie/Eno conjurings of plodding Gothic on Warszawa. That video bank from The Man Who Fell To Earth has been displaced by the whole of post World War II musical influences all coming through a wall of speakers each tuned to a different wavelength. There's a search going on on Low, and the answers to the questions are as vague as the strange symbols up on the blackboard. And me, well I'm not even sure that I have my right glasses on.