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Old 09-15-2017, 06:24 AM   #86 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Join Date: Oct 2008
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Album title: No Plan
Artist: David Bowie
Genre: Art Rock
Nationality: English
Release date: January 8
Position in Discography: Last ever
Familiar with this artist? Duh!
Familiar with the genre or subgenre? Yes
Check out more from this artist? Sadly, impossible
Check out more from this genre or subgenre? Always

Hold on a moment: what's going on here? I thought Blackstar was Bowie's last album, written even as he faced death and prepared to leave us all shattered and emotional cripples as he left us? How could there be ... ah. I see. This is posthumous material he and Tony Visconti were working on prior to his death. Okay, well it's Bowie so I guess I could just give it the highest rating without even listening to it (like there's any doubt it would get that anyway) but this is a chance to listen, once more, probably for the last time ever, to new music from the late Thin White Duke, so why would I pass up that opportunity? It's only four tracks, sadly, so an EP rather than an album, but hey, four new Bowie tracks is surely better than none.

And it's not on Spotify! Never mind: YouTube to the rescue! Fittingly, but perhaps slightly disappointingly, the EP opens with one of his best, and most poignant later songs, “Lazarus”, and it's a wonderfully heartbreaking song which shows the artist at both his most human and fragile, while yet at his most both somehow defiant and accepting of his fate. These songs were to be part of a musical of the same name which sadly of course never came to pass, due to Bowie's untimely death. “No plan” then is another soft soulful little ballad, which sounds both like it belongs firmly in the seventies and is completely contemporary (how did he do that so easily?) then with a title like “Killing a little time” there's an opportunity to marvel at both the man's disregard for and embracing of his fate – he wasn't going to go quietly and unremarked, was he? - with a much harder, more bitter edge, until all too soon it's wrapping up with “When I met you” which reminds me of one of his older classic songs, just can't place it.

Obviously, too short but a wonderful final coda to the music of the man who for many of us created a soundtrack to our lives, showed us what music was all about, invented and reinvented himself more than anyone else in music, always not only kept up with the trends but usually set them, and who most of us still find it hard to believe is no longer with us. God rest ye David.


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