“The Next Day,” David Bowie’s twenty-sixth studio album, has been awaited with such anticipation that “anticipation” feels like too weak a word, better suited to the release of a sneaker. In 2004, Bowie had a heart attack, and he was recently rumored to be in poor health. Leading up to the release of “The Next Day,” a jittery cathexis formed. Do we judge Bowie as we always have, by his own standards? Would a new album be received reverentially, like those of the post-motorcycle-crash Bob Dylan?
The sense of both expectation and need in the press—the phrase “greatest comeback in rock-and-roll history” has been cited repeatedly—speaks to the energy invested in a sixty-six-year-old pop star. People care, and remain curious, but only rarely do they hope for so much.
Fascination with the album has been compounded by a rare coup. “The Next Day” was made in secrecy during the past two years, largely in lower Manhattan, with the producer Tony Visconti, Bowie’s frequent collaborator, and veteran musicians with whom he’s worked before. One track, “Where Are We Now?,” was released in early January, without warning, an act that served as the album’s announcement. Such a display of privacy is almost performance art these days, though Bowie seems motivated not by paranoid seclusion but simply by the desire to work without unwanted feedback. He has made it clear that he won’t tour for “The Next Day,” beyond perhaps a single show, and he also won’t be attending the opening of the retrospective of his career at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. But he has demurred before, after “Lodger” (1979) and “Scary Monsters” (1980), and eventually, after a few years, he got back to working much as he had previously.
The current level of interest in Bowie reflects a larger theme in pop-music culture. While the long view of musical history suggests the obvious—that the greats remain great while a few fade out—in the near term, some acts seize the imagination of the moment. The Beatles have a flawless catalogue, but their aesthetic has left them on the outside for now: cartoons, granny glasses, and French horns don’t fit into 2013. Conversely, the ennui of present versions of punk and disco and rap—rooted in a young adult’s curt dismissal rather than a child’s open acceptance—has reinforced a common taste for darker acts such as Bowie. We no longer believe that all you need is love (or embroidered bell-bottoms), but we do believe in androgyny and world-weary dance parties buoyed by cocaine and artificially sour exchanges that mask a deep romantic streak. Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke of “Station to Station,” one of Bowie’s best albums, were always coming on aloof and imperious, then begging you to stay. His catalogue, though not as fault-free as that of the Beatles, or even that of Led Zeppelin, provides grist for today’s music-making cohort. Bowie has lasted, and he has found a place in the twenty-first century as an idea and a musician and a series of haircuts.
But does “The Next Day,” which revolves around references to death and to Bowie’s own work, complete that transition? It succeeds because none of the self-reflection results in pastiche or sentimentality; the problem is that the production that Bowie and Visconti chose for the songs puts this record, sonically, closer to the blocky drums and sports-bar guitars of eighties albums like “Let’s Dance” and “Tonight” than to some of his slightly hidden gems from the past two decades. The magnificent “Heathen,” from 2002, an album with fewer good songs than “The Next Day,” was a more cohesive marriage of electronic textures and traditional guitar work, and Bowie was in robust voice. Bowie and Visconti worked on that together, and it’s difficult to understand how they could have been so in synch with the moment then but not now.
“The Next Day” uses sounds that are several decades old, particularly reverb settings and synthesizers that even a musical illiterate will identify as sounding “eighties.” Regardless of whether these markers are intentional, it’s clear that Bowie does want you to think about time: specifically, the time that David Jones (his birth name) has spent being David Bowie. The art work for “The Next Day” is a replica of the cover of “Heroes,” from 1977, tweaked so that a white square obscures Bowie’s face and the title of the old album is crossed out. Other references snake through songs. The peppy Motown beat of “Dancing in Outer Space” is more or less that of “Modern Love,” from “Let’s Dance”; “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” fades out with the drumbeat of “Five Years,” from “Ziggy Stardust.”
The single “Where Are We Now?” is one of the album’s most emotionally direct songs, and it carefully melts down elements from “Heroes” without being too obvious. It is slow and elegiac but doesn’t drag—a few arpeggiated guitar chords ring for the length of entire measures, along with sustained piano chords and an understated drumbeat. Bowie’s voice, which is placed high in the mix, is only slightly diminished by age. There is a striation in his mighty sound, the streaks of time passing, hardly disabling but impossible to miss.
The song’s lyrics start with a plaint that could also be a joke: “Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz. You never knew that, that I could do that. Just walking the dead.” Does this refer to his own frailty—that one might not think he could travel alone—or is it a reference to the divided Berlin of “Heroes,” a suggestion that he can go back to that time without harming himself emotionally or artistically? The chorus is simply the title of the song, repeated, pained but not pathetic. This all sets up a final build, a devastating, slow, and deliberate accretion. The drums switch to a heavy tattoo without speeding up. Some phrases repeat twice, some come only once: “As long as there’s sun, as long as there’s rain, as long as there’s fire, as long as there’s me, as long as there’s you.” Maybe we can be heroes, it seems to say, if only for five minutes.
“Where Are We Now?” is not only the album’s gentlest song; it is one of the few that push Bowie’s voice to the front and let us luxuriate in it. For much of the album, which tends toward a middling rock feel, his voice is buried in the center of the music. But one of the best songs, the trim and taut “I’d Rather Be High,” details a soldier’s troubles without the finger-wagging that can turn topical songs into lectures. The music is perky, a shuffling beat anchoring a twinkly, high guitar figure by Gerry Leonard. The opening lyrics could be about anybody “upon the beach,” gossiping till their “lips are bleeding,” though the chorus makes clear who is watching whom: “I’d rather be high, I’d rather be flying, I’d rather be dead or out of my head than training these guns on those men in the sand, I’d rather be high.” But the mood of the song isn’t especially dark, because Bowie and Visconti are able to couch the fear of a confused soldier inside an equally believable state of mind, one in which he’s thinking about “teen-age sex” and getting high, as well as not shooting at people he doesn’t know.
Production aside, these songs are strong enough that there hasn’t been a Bowie album this good in—well, the bar rats can fight it out. It’s not “Station to Station,” but it’s a fine rock record that is a few hairs away from being among his best. Even the obsessives should be able to accept that. ♦
