Review Thread: The Chameleon: David Bowie Reviewed

^ Looking forward to your take on it.

And, yeah, I'll just type up the Baal review once Scary Monsters is done. It's only 5 tracks, so it won't exactly take long.
 
David Bowie – Pin Ups

david_bowie_pin_ups.jpg


Tracklist:
  1. Rosalyn
  2. Here Comes the Night
  3. I Wish You Would
  4. See Emily Play
  5. Everything's Alright
  6. I Can't Explain
  7. Friday on My Mind
  8. Sorrow
  9. Don't Bring Me Down
  10. Shapes of Things
  11. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
  12. Where Have All The Good Times Gone
    Bonus Tracks
  13. Growin' Up
  14. Amsterdam

Year: 1973​

This album proves, if nothing else, that in 1973 Bowie had one hell of a taste in music, and that Mick Ronson is a pretty damn versatile guitarist. There are however quite a few drawbacks to having a full cover album. You’re always going to disappoint some fans and slaughter some already very good songs. The album starts with Rosalyn by the Pretty Things. While Bowie might not be able to pull of the vocals of the original, the whole fuzzy guitar sound is maintained brilliantly by Ronson.

I’d like to take a moment to comment on the actual flow on the album, this has been done surprisingly well. There has been some form of effort here with the track listing and transitions to keep the album coherent. Here Comes the Night by Them always feels like it could have been done a lot better. You’ll quickly forget this though, as the brilliantly done I Wish You Would YardbirRAB cover redeems the start of the album.

An interesting point here is of course that I Wish You Would was actually a Billy Boy Arnold Song, so it’s a cover of a cover. Again Ronson seems to outshine Bowie on the recording. This transitions into a very good yet very bad cover of Pink Floyd’s See Emily Play. The chorus has been murdered, but Bowie’s performance on the verse is very good. In the end the song not only runs to long, but simply becomes annoying, a disappointment as you’d think Bowie covering Floyd would be quite awesome.

Everything’s Alright by The Mojos features one of Bowie’s best vocal performances on the album. And always makes for a refreshing change in the album. The Cover of I Can’t Explain by the Who is an awesome slab of glam helped along massively once along by Ronson. The whole song is done in such a cheesy fashion you can’t help but smile. Also done well is Friday On My Mind, which is far more in Bowie’s style, which I feel is the type of cover he does much better.

Sorrow surprisingly got Bowie a charting single from the album, reaching number 3 on the UK singles chart. Having been a relatively popular song by the Merseys, it’s not a bad song, it just doesn’t seem to make much of an impression. Don’t Bring Me Down marks the second Pretty Things song that is done very well by Bowie on the album. The riff is infections and Bowie manages to do the song justice.

The second YardbirRAB cover, Shapes of things (Incidentally my favourite YardbirRAB song) is done incredibly well, with some nice innovations. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere is a great Who cover which really does translate a lot of the same energy of the original. The original album enRAB with a rather lacklustre version of the Kinks’ Where Have All The Good Times Gone.

However the re-issue includes two brilliant covers far more suited to Bowie’s style in Growin’ Up and Amsterdam. Both of which increase the whole appeal of the album, and as such I will consider them in the rating. The whiole album is good, but dissapointing, some of the choices aren't that appropriate for Bowie. But a very large part of the album is saved by Mick Ronson's guitar

6/10​
 
Heroes​
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After completely shattering the public image of himself on Low by seemingly committing career suicide with a predominantly electronic album, rather than a more commercial-sounding follow-up, Bowie decided to plunge headfirst into the weird. This album is possibly the strangest music he would ever release, and it must be remembered that despite containing his best-loved song, the title track's status as stadium fodder belies just how complex, dark and downright weird it's parent album is. This album used to be my favourite Bowie release, but the time has come to see if I still rate it as highly.

The album begins with Beauty And The Beast, a bizarre funk workout featuring Bowie's heavily treated vocals and lyrics which seem to be concerned with some class of chaos. As a stand-alone track, it's a bit odd, but as an album opener it works brilliantly by setting the tone for the rest of the record-uneasy, manic, unpredictable. This is followed by the surrealist character sketch Joe The Lion, in which Bowie manges to connect masochistic fortune tellers, a protagonist who is somehow "made of iron", and urges the listener to "buy a gun".

The sheer weirdness of this track is a joy to behold, and a perfect precursor to the mixture of joy and despair which makes up the title song, with it's sonically extraordinary guitar playing by Robert Fripp making the tale of doomed love seem like the most inspiring track ever written. This romanticism continues through the sorrow of Sons Of The Silent Age, seemingly a requiem for the lost souls "who glide in and out of life" and the terror of Blackout, in which some of the strangest funk ever recorded functions as the soundtrack for the most unnerving lyrics on the album, suggesting the darkness and paranoia of Low has not yet passed.

The constant mood shifts of the record continue into the soaring joy of V-2 Schneider, a mostly instrumental piece in which the only vocals are the title being repeated as a sort of chorus, yet the music radiates joy. Then come the instrumentals, evoking that the fear of Low remains in tracks such as Sense Of Doubt, but also that a new fascination with his environment has come into play with Neukoln attempting to convey life inside the Berlin of the 70's, and a desire to explore the outside world in the form of the evokation of Japan in Moss Garden. The album is ideally rounded off with The Secret Life Of Arabia, providing a silly disco conclusion to round off an album of constantly shifting mooRAB.

In conclusion, after reassessing the album, I would no longer consider it his finest work, with Low and Scary Monsters being better albums. However, I would consider it his most creative, as despite the constant musical and emotional shifts it still makes a coherent whole.

9/10 ​
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