It used to be easy. Once a year or so, David Bowie would choose a new persona, pick up a fresh batch of pop-culture reference points, borrow a new musical style and release a new album. Then we'd all sit around and figure out who he was this time. Ziggy Stardust? Aladdin Sane? The Thin White Duke? The Lodger? The Serious Moonlighter?
pastiche of elements from all the previous Bowies, an unfocused conglomeration of
Aladdin Sane's hard rock,
Station to Station's dense sound and
Let's
Dance's backbeat. It may well be the noisiest, sloppiest Bowie album ever. Being noisy and sloppy isn't necessarily a bad thing – after all, it makes this LP more interesting than 1984's
Tonight, which was distinguished chiefly by its duliness – but sad to say,
Never Let Me Down is also something of a mess.
Sure, it might be a big hit: Bowie is going on tour, his tours are events, and events sell records. And he's turned lackluster records into hits in the past; in fact, he's reached a startling level of influence and status while making few genuinely groundbreaking records. He helped bring glitter rock, Philly soul and European technopop to a broader audience, but for every standout LP, he's released a couple of weak ones. Bowie's triumph is the creation of a small but indelible gallery of images, looks, characters and moments in pop history; his ace in the hole is his ability to give even disappointing albums bench-mark hit singles, like "Rebel Rebel," from Diamond Dogs, and the title tracks from Young Americans and Let's Dance.
As much a dramatist as he is a musician, Bowie is at his best only when he has both a strong dramatic text and a coherent musical context: the roaring bravado of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the formidable density of Station to Station, the rootless chill of Lodger. Never Let Me Down doesn't aim for that kind of coherence; its grandiose, unfocused frenzy is part of the point. And at first, Bowie and coproducer David Richards (the team responsible for Iggy Pop's Blah-Blah-Blah) seem to have hit on an invigorating, nervy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach.
On "Day-In Day-Out," a sketchy portrait of a woman adrift on the streets, the rhythm section pumps away, jagged guitar solos cut in and out of the mix, art-rock keyboards swell in the distance, R&B horns punctuate the melody, and the backup singers are by turns angelic and aggressive. Though the song is vaguely annoying, it's also dizzying and fun, as is the hypnotic "Time Will Crawl," the saxophone-spiked rocker "Too Dizzy" and Bowie's version of Iggy's 1981 romp "Bang Bang," even if David can't come close to his buddy's deadpan detachment.
But the fun wears off quickly. Song after song shifts earnestly but jarringly from one style to another. Bowie piles on
