#781 David Bowie - Reality

I kinda feel bad for David Bowie.

1) This album isn't that great.
2) The persona here is a man dragging on, getting old, pushing, but needing to push harder and harder
3) As a kid, he got popped in the face so hard it BROKE HIS EYE.

I mean, the album's ok, giving off a slinky late-Iggy sheen, with plenty of Low-era bent-pop Enosifications. Reality-Bowie stalks the streets watching it whip by, half-present like Ballard's ghost. Sinatra at his darkest he evokes the darkness, like Donald Fagan at his best he evokes emptiness, crafting angular metalic curve from sound and vision.

But the execution is just clumsy, with kitchen sink production and rough transitions tainting some of the faster songs, and molasses lethargy plaguing the slower. Even the cool isn't quite pulled off; the instrumentation in particular sounds grasping, overmixed, overclose, as if in your face muttering I still got it. Tell me I don't!

Maybe the real reason I feel bad for Bowie is that he can't out-Bowie himself anymore. If this had been some anonymous old man who put this out it would be an underground classic, but its David Motherfuckin Bowie, and we can't help but see this ghost and remember the man 3/5