Heroes
After completely shattering the public image of himself on Low by seemingly committing career suicide with a predominantly electronic album, rather than a more commercial-sounding follow-up, Bowie decided to plunge headfirst into the weird. This album is possibly the strangest music he would ever release, and it must be remembered that despite containing his best-loved song, the title track's status as stadium fodder belies just how complex, dark and downright weird it's parent album is. This album used to be my favourite Bowie release, but the time has come to see if I still rate it as highly.
The album begins with Beauty And The Beast, a bizarre funk workout featuring Bowie's heavily treated vocals and lyrics which seem to be concerned with some class of chaos. As a stand-alone track, it's a bit odd, but as an album opener it works brilliantly by setting the tone for the rest of the record-uneasy, manic, unpredictable. This is followed by the surrealist character sketch Joe The Lion, in which Bowie manges to connect masochistic fortune tellers, a protagonist who is somehow "made of iron", and urges the listener to "buy a gun".
The sheer weirdness of this track is a joy to behold, and a perfect precursor to the mixture of joy and despair which makes up the title song, with it's sonically extraordinary guitar playing by Robert Fripp making the tale of doomed love seem like the most inspiring track ever written. This romanticism continues through the sorrow of Sons Of The Silent Age, seemingly a requiem for the lost souls "who glide in and out of life" and the terror of Blackout, in which some of the strangest funk ever recorded functions as the soundtrack for the most unnerving lyrics on the album, suggesting the darkness and paranoia of Low has not yet passed.
The constant mood shifts of the record continue into the soaring joy of V-2 Schneider, a mostly instrumental piece in which the only vocals are the title being repeated as a sort of chorus, yet the music radiates joy. Then come the instrumentals, evoking that the fear of Low remains in tracks such as Sense Of Doubt, but also that a new fascination with his environment has come into play with Neukoln attempting to convey life inside the Berlin of the 70's, and a desire to explore the outside world in the form of the evokation of Japan in Moss Garden. The album is ideally rounded off with The Secret Life Of Arabia, providing a silly disco conclusion to round off an album of constantly shifting moods.
In conclusion, after reassessing the album, I would no longer consider it his finest work, with Low and Scary Monsters being better albums. However, I would consider it his most creative, as despite the constant musical and emotional shifts it still makes a coherent whole.
9/10