David Bowie – Low

The first album in David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy sees Bowie as a tragic figure. The album's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed, while the blank, instrumental second side feels like a calculated attempt to kill the author.

Compared to its predecessors, David Bowie's 11th studio album is noticeably reserved. "I had no statement to make on Low," said Bowie, who could hardly write lyrics at all in the aftermath of his L.A. excesses, let alone fashion another extensive character study like Ziggy or the Thin White Duke. His lyrical gifts were already spread thin and thinner still when a completed third verse was cut from "Always Crashing in the Same Car," in which Bowie did his very best Bob Dylan impression. Bowie was hardly lucid in 1976, but you bet he knew exactly what he was doing with that verse. The Bowie of this era is a tragic figure: strung out and prone to spending days awake watching the same films on a loop. Yet Bowie's sense of purpose was at least somewhat intact. He applied exacting pressure on Iggy to make The Idiot as good as he knew it could be, and brought similar determination to Low, albeit the kind where having very few aims was its own liberating objective. Low's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed. Tony Visconti heightens the decay and distils the lifespan of every sound, treating Dennis Davis' drums so that he was playing along to a withered echo of his last strike, like an explosion contained in a tin can. Even Bowie's voice sounds aged and distant. Eno's sharp electronics jostle against the bolshy funk rhythms and Carlos Alomar and Ricky Gardiner's guitars, giving the record a feverish euphoria that hits like too much pseudo-ephedrine and mangles linear time. These swaggering fragments, seldom breaking the three-minute mark, promise bombastic payoffs but then fade out instead. Low's first side feels like having the carpet ripped out from under you by three wizards who have plans to fly it elsewhere. The mostly instrumental second side is a tribute to the people of the Soviet Bloc —Poland on "Warszawa," and East Berlin on the remaining three songs—in which the elusive nature of side 1 subsides and Bowie's persona is subsumed into his and Eno's pulsating sequences. These were carefully calibrated attempts at killing the author: Eno set out a metronome pulse, and the pair selected a random beat on which to introduce a new musical complement to the central motif. It’s credit to their influence that these songs sound pedestrian, even a little ponderous by today’s standards, but the way they conjure lost worlds is still something to behold. It makes good on the album cover's subtle joke: a still from Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth where Bowie’s orange hair fades into the background; the word 'Low' atop a vanishing profile. Bowie's meticulously crafted existence had always offered fans a sense of possibility. By submitting his ego to Low, he was able to create a new one for himself.

Ripped to MP3

A

1. Speed Of Life

2. Breaking Glass

3. What In The World

4. Sound And Vision

5. Always Crashing In The Same Car

6. Be My Wife

7. A New Career In A New Town

B

1. Warszawa

2. Art Decade

3. Weeping Wall

4. Subterraneans