David Bowie - Heathen
(Columbia)
Ever since 1984's Tonight, David Bowie has been getting slammed. And even an ardent Bowie fan like me will admit that Tonight was the start of a dark period for Bowie. But since 1993's highly underrated Black Tie, White Noise, Bowie has been making music that may not be as consistent as in his 70s heyday, but is certainly interesting enough that it doesn't warrant the bad press and dwindling sales that it has been receiving. Albums like Outside, Buddha of Suburbia, and Earthling are all worth hearing, and contain some of Bowie's best work.
But even all that pales in the wake of Heathen, Bowie's newest album, and probably his best since 1983's Let's Dance, although it's nothing like that extremely commercial and popular album. Heathen also marks the first time Bowie has worked with Tony Visconti since 1980. Visconti is a legend himself. Aside from producing some of T. Rex's greatest albums, he's also played bass with Bowie and produced the classics Young Americans, Low, "Heroes" , Lodger, and Scary Monsters. He and Ken Scott are the two great Bowie producers (Scott having produced everything from Hunky Dory to Pin-Ups), but Visconti is the better of the two. Here, he gives Bowie a focus he hasn't had since, well, Let's Dance. If his albums from Tonight up to this point have had some excellent, tight songs juxtaposed with rambling shambles of songs or instrumentals that only recalled the greatness of similar and superior songs on the Berlin Trilogy, here Bowie is working with a set of songs where each is as good as the last, and you can't imagine one missing. A song like the opener, "Sunday," with subtle electronics and a slow build, packs a punch that only a couple of the tracks on Outside possessed. Other songs, like "Slow Burn," recall Bowie's glory days while still sounding new. And "Afraid" is what Hours... should have sounded like.
Part of the reason the album works so well is the inclusion of three great covers. Bowie is one of those few artists whose covers can actually beat the originals (two others would be Bryan Ferry and Marianne Faithfull). For this album, he's picked The Pixies' "Cactus," Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting For You," and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's "I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship." He imbues "Cactus" with a sense of weirdness that the Pixies original doesn't possess, which makes Bowie's version preferable. "I've Been Waiting For You" sounds just like a Bowie original, until someone pointed out it was a cover I thought it was just another Bowie song. And "I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship" is among the best of the songs on the album. The production and the performances come together to create a singular experience. I can't even imagine what the original would sound like.
I remember when Hours... came out, Bowie said it was just a foray into more conventional songwriting, and that his next album would return him to experimenting. At the time, experimenting for Bowie meant working with industrial or jungle sounds. But Heathen finds Bowie in between the two poles. The songwriting here is uniformly strong and doesn't sound experimental. The production uses electronics and some of it could be termed electronica, but it's nowhere as near in the forefront as it has been on recent albums. The mix creates something that feels experimental but doesn't sound it. As soon as Bowie stopped trying to blast forward and pioneer, he relaxed into a place that sounds both old and new at once. Will it ever be as important as something like Ziggy Stardust, Low, or Scary Monsters? No. But Columbia's promotional slogan for the album rings surprisingly close to the truth. Heathen actually is "classic Bowie circa 2002."
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