David Bowie's final album Blackstar is perhaps the most extraordinary in his amazing career
Blackstar glories in its voyage of discovery, musicians relishing the freedom afforded them, and their jazz schooling allows them to use it to enhance the raw material
* This review was first published on David Bowie's 69th birthday - Friday, January 8th - before his death.
When David Bowie released The Next Day in 2013, pop’s great re-inventor pulled off the most unexpected and celebrated comeback of modern times.
Three years later, it’s impossible for the arrival of this follow-up to create similar shockwaves, but the music within it certainly does.
As he celebrates his 69th birthday today, Bowie is in a privileged position.
Happily married, he is able to enjoy fatherhood the second time around having put his past drug demons to rest.
He maintains a lofty mystique, refusing multi-million-dollar offers to play live and shunning media interviews.
Away from the celebrity mill he’s been able to indulge his love of art collecting and history.
The Next Day, and the lavish David Bowie Is... exhibition that accompanied its release (and has toured the world in his absence), put his career in an artful perspective.
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Both projects raided and rearranged his past to such an extent that a new departure was the only option – if he was to stay true to the questing spirit he holds dear.
“Once something is categorized and accepted... it loses its potency,” he told an interviewer back in 1998. “It’s always been that way for me. The most imprisoning thing is to feel myself being pigeonholed.”
True to his word, in a typically audacious move, Blackstar teams Bowie with a group of jazz musicians who have been given free rein to breath strange and startling life into his new songs.
And what songs they are – tantalisingly tuneful, avant garde, bleak, beautiful and spectacular.
The four distinct sections that mark the opening 10-minute title track bear comparison to the structure of the epochal Station To Station, but the Middle Eastern shadings and execution ritual suggested by the lyric broker something entirely new.
The sense of dread and beauty is reflected elsewhere in the gorgeous melody of Dollar Days or the troubled, sax-strafed ’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore, and the eruptive martial beat that drives Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime).
Lazarus provides a field day for Bowie-philes searching for meaning. The Cracked Actor reveals he has “scars that can’t be seen” while the musicians map a skeletal funk wreathed in gloomy mystery.
It’s a definite high point – one of his finest melodies, weaving together images of the humdrum, oblique and absurd. The title alone is a stark reminder that it is something of a miracle Bowie’s still here at all.
But here indeed he is, singing better than ever – sonorous and commanding, nuanced and deeply felt.
Blackstar glories in its voyage of discovery, musicians relishing the freedom afforded them, and their jazz schooling allows them to use it to enhance the raw material.
Bowie is, of course, still mindful of his posterity and mortality, and if he is once again to retreat into the shadows after Blackstar then the final track, I Can’t Give Everything Away, is a pointed farewell.
From The Prettiest Star to the Blackstar, the message has always been in the music.
Considering the innovations and inspirations Bowie has brokered in the last half century, this thrilling departure may be the most extraordinary of his fabled career.
Happy birthday indeed.
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