David Bowie - The Next Day

'...hours was just pish

i actually like tin machine for real i am not joking

There's two of us around these parts.

"http://www.myspace.com/davidbowie/music/albums";

this is the first time I've seen someone actually use myspace in quite a while

There's two of us around these parts.

+ 1

especially tin machine 2

'...hours was just pish

This is not even true! It starts off slowly and the production's a bit Natalie Imbruglia, but it still has loads of great songs e.g. "If I'm Dreaming My Life", which - performed and produced in the appropriate style* - would have stood out as a good one on any of his albums.

*I appreciate that these words are doing a lot of work here.

Agree that it is production to some extent but I often question his choice of musicians.

Anyway looking forward to next album, 'White Smoke, White Pope'

well, considering that Bowie and Reeves Gabrels played most of the instruments on ...hours and produced it themselves, they get the blame for how flat those songs are.

Well Gabriels was in Tin Machine

Have the Sales Bros done anything since Tin machine? They're awesome.

Gabrels was the best thing about Tin Machine iirc. Sons of Soupy were good on the rhythm tracks and lousy when they got their turn at the mic

'hours' has easily the worst production on any Bowie album. I wonder if I like it even less than Tonight and the Tin Machine albums. I put it on every few months to see if I've missed anything but it never really comes. 'Thursday's Child' is always good though.

liking this album far more than i thought i would

hours is a hard listen. I think the problem is just too much gabrels. he's fine in more limited doses, and I even like all his tin machine work, but he had too much of a hand in everything else on hours and just stinks it up.

Listened to Never Let Me Down Again today and a lot of it is fun. Glass Spider is camply exciting. Hours is the better album, but in terms of production depends whether you prefer garishly ugly to mild and dull.

Also watched the video for the (terrible) NLMDA single Day In Day Out. A 40-year-old Bowie on roller skates watching the hooker get raped is something to see I guess.

I've never minded the stoopidity of "Beat of Your Drum" ("Disco brat...follow the pack!").

Time will crawl

Liked that one at the time

About Beat of Your Drum, according to Pushing Ahead of the Dame, Bowie said, "It’s a Lolita Number! Reflection on young girls... Christ, she’s only 14 years old, but jail’s worth it!"

I watched the Glass Spider live video last night while drunk, it was massively entertaining.

the Bowie blog was fair to the Glass Spider, which is embarrassing but not more so than Bowie often is.

Time Will Crawl, Never Let Me Down, Day in Day Out are ok, the rest of it is bah. Bang BAng was ok for another Iggy cover, just not as good as the original. But shining star and stuff is PAINFUL.

It's always important to remember the amount of hype that record got. He was getting compared to Lennon a lot as well (for his vocal timbre on the record I think), I distinctly remember "this is the best bowie album since Scary Monsters" getting thrown around on release. WTF.

Well, check this interview out. He's enthused!

http://www.teenagewildlife.com/Appearances/Press/1987/0800/musician.html

MUSICIAN: What do you play on this album?

BOWIE: I do a lot of keyboard things, like synthesizer parts, some rhythm guitar and I play lead on a couple of tracks: "New York's In Love" and "'87 And Cry".

MUSICIAN: On those songs you wanted to have a go at it yourself?

BOWIE: I'd done it on the demo. Peter laid down a couple of solos in the middle, and it wasn't quite what I wanted. So I thought, maybe I should put down what I did and see if it works the way it did in the demo. No disregard for Peter's playing; it just wasn't the kind of guitar I wanted. Peter's too controlled. Mine is a lot of effects and ambiance, just trying to get an atmosphere rather than play. I don't know about "playing".

MUSICIAN: Was it difficult assembling the band on Never Let Me Down?

BOWIE: Physically, no, because Erdal and I put down such a lot of work before anything really started. I'd prepared everything pretty well on the demo at my house. I'd done all the head arrangements, I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound, so Erdal and I spent the first two weeks putting down everything as a backbone. Then Carlos came in, then Peter. It was really that simple. I had a very fixed idea of how it should be. The longest time was just putting my vocals down.

Tonight the Zeroes were waiting for you

Hagiography but a friend who worked as an assistant in the Montreux studio at the time swears up and down that NLMD was ruined in the mixing process and that there's a great album in there. I don't care? but I can believe it

ok let's stop talking about that shitty album. new one is better

Even if I want to believe "Shining Star" and "New York's in Love" are good songs, there's still the matter of Bowie singing them.

so, is now the right time to ask if anyone has a ripped copy of bowies version of 'love missile f1-11' that was featured on the dvd single of 'new killer star' ?

It's on the iTunes version of the New Killer Star single (in my part of the world - NL)

1) This album is a lot better than I expected.

2) This album is also exhausting, which doesn't exactly negate number one but makes listening in longer than short bursts tough.

so, is now the right time to ask if anyone has a ripped copy of bowies version of 'love missile f1-11' that was featured on the dvd single of 'new killer star'

...wait, what?

http://youtu.be/B6fudSHb0js

Apparently so, from a 2003 DVD single.

(The 2003 is superfluous there, did that phase last longer than the one year?)

* Warning: Drunken Post * If this album had been called "Sense Of Doubt"
I wouldnt've flinched. I have been coming back to it on a daily basis since I
bought it and l continue finding fascinating moments in its bitter, desperate
sounding form. It's a grumpy, bleak fucking record at the end and I love it more
and more for that.

Don't know what's surprising me more, seeing a celebratory review of the album at the National Review or discovering the author of that review has also written a book about Steve Kilbey.

He can get away with this because The Next Day is an honest-to-God album, meant to be listened to as one piece rather than as a scattered collection of iTunes downloads. In this sense it is both archaic and forward-looking — its very existence is a sign, or a hopeful prediction, of some kind of return to craftsmanship in popular music. We’ve already seen harbingers of this in the success of Adele’s album 21 and the resurgent popularity of “roots” music among younger listeners; people are once again responding to music that sounds real. The Next Day, even with its freaked-out guitars and fuzzy synths, feels similarly authentic: It is refreshingly free of any discernible loops or electronic drums; the vocals have not been strangled by Auto-Tune; none of the musicians e-mailed their parts in from distant locales.

Why...why it's almost...REAL.

Does Salaryman's drumming count as electronic?

I like this sentence: "The real David Bowie remains as hidden as ever; his obfuscation, once regarded as a drawback, now seems, in our age of overexposure, as enticing as an oasis in a desert." All those commas building up to the big simile: "an oasis in a desert"! As opposed to all those other oases elsewhere.

as opposed to the other commas

"....Hours" was not essential, but still better than anything he did between 1984 and 1993.

(In terms of albums - it was not better than "Absolute Beginners" or "Loving The Alien" obv. )

Geir, you mean Tonight?

Or those two songs were better than Hours?

Billboard:

Earlier this week we reported that Bon Jovi and David Bowie were vying for the No. 1 slot on next week's Billboard 200 albums chart. However, Bon Jovi has now pulled ahead, and it seems like the band's "What About Now" is a lock for a No. 1 bow on the chart.

Industry sources suggest the group's album might sell just under 90,000 copies by the end of the tracking week on Sunday, March 17. It will mark the band's fifth No. 1 set -- and third straight studio effort to hit the top.

Meanwhile, David Bowie's new "The Next Day" -- his first studio album since 2003 -- should arrive in the No. 2 position with perhaps 80,000.

While a No. 1 album will seemingly continue to elude Bowie (who has yet to notch a chart-topper), a No. 2 bow will give him his best ranking ever. Somewhat shockingly, his highest-charting album to date is 1976's "Station to Station," which peaked at No. 3.

"The Next Day" will also likely score Bowie his best sales week for an album in the Nielsen SoundScan era (1991-present). He's never sold more than 55,000 in a week for a single album, when 2002's "Heathen" debuted at No. 14.

Bon Jovi vs. David Bowie fite!

90,000 Bon Jovi fans can be wrong. (Tip your waitstaff.)

It's official:

LONDON – David Bowie's The Next Day -- the rock icon's first album in 10 years -- is the fastest-selling of the year in the U.K. so far, topping the British album chart in its first week of sales.

The chart was unveiled March 17.

The album is the 66-year-old's first No. 1 since his 1993 release, Black Tie White Noise.

The Next Day sold 94,000 copies this week, according to the Official Chart Co., outselling the No. 2 album, from Bon Jovi, by a ratio of 2-to-1.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/84/Bon_Jovi_100_Million_Bon_Jovi_Fans.jpg/220px-Bon_Jovi_100_Million_Bon_Jovi_Fans.jpg