Grade: A-
Note: I was finished with the review when I heard the tragic news of David Bowie’s death. I had no idea when I was writing this that it would be his last album. The world will miss the brilliant light of his music. I hope he found that Starman.
David Bowie has gone by many names over the years. He’s been Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke. On “Blackstar,” his jazzy and modernist twenty-fifth studio album, he once again proves he is one of a kind.
The titular opening track sets the tone for the album. Its length and varying tone are similar to “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles. The first half features some dissonant harmonies and Bowie singing cryptic lyrics in a haunting voice, creating a mysterious soundscape.
At around the four-minute mark, however, the song changes.
With its science fiction like sound effects and repetition of the word “blackstar”, it is reminiscent of Bowie’s earlier album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.” This song ultimately features Bowie in two different modes – the experimentalist and the crowd-pleasing space traveler.
More often than not, “Blackstar” finds Bowie playing the experimentalist. He sings of loneliness and weaknesses while the music behind him is either strange or lively.
The last song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” combines moody lyrics and exuberant music into an entertaining mix.
Bowie is backed by some excellent musicians. Saxophonist Donny McCaslin proves his versatility time and time again. Drummer Mark Guiliana provides great jazz and rock beats, which act as a solid foundation for Bowie’s vocals to go in any direction he feels like.
Bowie’s voice has aged well. At 69, he doesn’t have the energetic quality he did during his Ziggy Stardust days. However, his voice still has that deep, hypnotic quality that makes you want to continue listening.
Bowie also plays acoustic guitar on “Blackstar.” He does a particularly good job with his part in the song “Lazarus.”
“Blackstar” and its tracks don’t really fit into a single genre; “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” opens with some blues-sounding guitar riffs that provide a background for a spiral into a mixture of electronic and rock.
Every song has jazz-inflected rhythms and instrumentations, but also enough eccentric touches to set it apart from what most people think of as jazz.
David Bowie has changed genres and looks more times than the average person gets their hair cut. The best description of him as a musician and a man can be found in something Brian Boyd once wrote about the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Boyd writes: “Mostly he is just himself.”
