David Bowie - The Next Day

Reality is underrated, IMO... I probably like that and Heathen more than The Next Day, and Outside over all of 'em. In fact, if it wasn't for hours... I'd say Bowie's work from 1995 onwards was quite strong... not 1971-1980 strong, but a very good run of LP's in their own right.

That's about right.

oh heathen, i forgot about that record. It was not bad iirc

Heathen is my favorite late-period Bowie next to Blackstar, for sure.

I get what Ned's saying, though... five years before The Next Day was released, I think pretty much most people considered Bowie retired and had come to terms with the fact that there may have not been any more new music from him. Five years after The Next Day and here we are knowing that there won't be anymore new music from him. The comeback feels like it lasted in the time it takes to blink your eyes, yet in Blackstar we're left with one of his best albums.

He revisited Low live in full during the Heathen era, if I remember correctly.

He did

https://vimeo.com/171621712

10 years old this week. I wrote about it for BA, mostly reprinting my original review from 2013, with a few new thoughts:

Ten years ago, on March 8, 2013, David Bowie released his next-to-last studio album, his first in 10 years. Bowie had always been an artist beloved of critics because he spoke their language, and flattered them. He was (apparently; I never spoke to him) a great interview subject — he knew a lot about art and pop, and could combine the two in beguiling ways. But to beguile means to deceive, and the illusion often faded quickly. Bowie knew this, and would frequently disavow previous work when selling the new stuff. On The Next Day, though, he made the links to his past explicit, almost as if he needed to remind people who he was (or had once been). The cover was literally the cover of 1977’s “Heroes”, with that title crossed out and a white square with the new album’s title slapped across it.

(Personally, I think Phil Collins pulled a much better version of this trick when he reissued his albums Face Value, No Jacket Required, and …But Seriously in 2016 or so, with new cover art that duplicated the originals, but now featured the old-man version of himself. A shot of old-man Bowie re-creating the “Heroes” pose would have been cooler than this.)

Some of the lyrics on The Next Day were about Berlin, too, and/or about subjects he had tackled in the old days, which allowed reviewers to flex their knowledge of his late ’70s albums (admittedly, his best work). And naturally, some writers took the bait. Rolling Stone called it “a triumphant album…the comeback Bowie fans feared would never happen” while explicitly citing Low, “Heroes”, Lodger, and Scary Monsters. The Guardian, meanwhile, did a deep dive into the lyrics and the sounds, attempting to spot as many references and bits of arcana as possible, like one of those conspiracy theorists’ yarn-and-Post-It-note charts that take over entire rooms, but ultimately came to the conclusion that “for all the pointers it offers in that direction, The Next Day isn’t the equal of Bowie’s ’70s work.”

Unperson I enjoyed reading your review yesterday & it prompted me to give this one another listen, which I also enjoyed. No smart things to say about it, but I'll probably listen again today/this week.

Thanks!

I never liked the cover of The Next Day, exactly, but it's hard to think of another cover from a "legacy artist" from the last couple of decades that's so bracing, so much of a slap across of the face to nostalgia. "It's not that anymore, now it's this".

I no longer think, per my original SPIN review, the album shouldn't have been recorded, but at the same time it's not a Bowie album I think much about.

I never liked the cover of The Next Day, exactly, but it's hard to think of another cover from a "legacy artist" from the last couple of decades that's so bracing, so much of a slap across of the face to nostalgia. "It's not that anymore, now it's this".

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41jSMXYTU+L.jpg

Yeah, but Neil Young is just lazy.

The Next Day has got no more or less reason to exist than Reality, with a few more good songs on it than the earlier record.

Nah, Reality's the better album. Nothing embarrasses me like "Boss of Me" or "Valentine's Day."

Now I want to listen to Heathen again.

I will say this about "Valentine's Day," John Cale did a pretty good version of it at one of those various Bowie tribute concerts.

I like Valentine's Day.

Looks like the bonus tracks aren't streaming?

Shame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0uw06jPCqY

Yeah, I like "Valentine's Day" too. I kind of like the video too - Bowie's still a good pantomime.

I also like Valentine’s Day. Feel you could comfortably snip tracks 8-12 and have a much much better album though.

Would be on the short side but still an album (I think somewhere between 33 or 34 minutes)

Definitely too long and uneven, but I think the album is OK, albeit nothing special. Blackstar is special and I could hear that even in the few days I had listening to it before his death changed its meaning.

I think the problem with The Next Day is that he'd been so long out of the game that he was probably worried whether he could pull it off, and so he consciously made a 'Bowie album', in the neoclassical rock mode of Heathen and Reality. It's of a piece with those two (although not as good as Heathen), whereas Blackstar is a new direction right at the end.

It's definitely another album that tries to reconsolidate his strengths rather than breaking new ground, but I thought it was better than Heathen and Reality. Those previous two weren't bad albums, but they weren't all that consistent either and I remember thinking they were overhyped. (Jim DeRogatis, who was always a bit skeptical of Bowie, gushed on the radio over Reality, saying "I never thought I'd recommend a Bowie album again.") I was very skeptical and dismissed the lead-up to The Next Day as more marketing hype, but to my surprise I enjoyed it quite a bit and I didn't think anything was terrible on it either - it was the first Bowie album since you-know-what where I didn't have to skip anything, I was fine letting the lesser parts play through. I thought that was the best I could ever hope for from Bowie, but Blackstar proved me wrong, and the weekend before he died, I played the shit out of it. It really sent my hopes though the roof, like we'd be getting more great albums going forward.

I thought it was better than Heathen and Reality. Those previous two weren't bad albums, but they weren't all that consistent either and I remember thinking they were overhyped

The Next Day for me

I think it's fascinating that it ends with "Heat" which really does point the way to "Blackstar".