album #43

station to station (david bowie)

I really liked every track on this album. This is a dark, weird, anxious record. Famously recorded amid a blizzard of cocaine, and I can certainly believe it. Wonderfully cool, synthetic sounds, and Bowie's yearning croon stretching throughout. It has taken me so long to try and put my finger on this album… it is still hard for me to totally capture what it feels like as a collective work, other than to say that it's dark, weird, and anxious. Like I already said.

"Station to Station" is ominous. It opens with a collage of fuzz, a paranoid, drippy guitar. Dark, icy, cabaret syrup. Then eventually, with “it’s too late- to be grateful” it reaches this fast, jamming, joyous pace. A great voyage- it starts in this futuristic, mechanical, scary place, and eventually surges into a fun, anthemic song. "Golden Years" is the most famous song here; fantastic, dark disco. "Word on a Wing" sounds like a cabaret ballad, a delicate song (except for Bowie’s loud, clear, powerful voice), with an anxiously, pleadingly sentimental tone. "TVC15" is awesomely weird, nice and upbeat and catchy. I love the viciously strange strings at the beginning and the refrain at the end. "Stay" stands out for the really nice guitars, the guitars drive the rythym in a nice, funky, uptempo way. Kindof a disco vibe, with more of that pleading vibe in the lyrics. And "Wild is the Wind," like the other Bowie records I've heard so far, closes the album with a surreal, pleading, distantly doomed vibe. It's a unique song, a steady beat, a tender lament, driven by a really nice, sad guitar. In many ways it sounds like an influence on the 80s.

In a way this reminds me of Ziggy Stardust- the way that Bowie takes (or perhaps introduces) the music of his time (on Ziggy, hard rock; here, funk and disco) and ties his darkness and surreality into the sound.

I have completely lost count of the adjectives I've tried to put into this music. Bowie's work is pretty fun, and also pretty difficult, to try and write about.

Now I'm trying to figure out which record I like more, this one or Hunky Dory. It's fascinating how appropriate those names are, on reflection. Hunky Dory… charming, cheerful, but almost a little embarassingly so. And the name Station to Station fits a philosophical vibe of this album… mechanical, the doom of inescapable sameness and rhythm. Hunky Dory has more masterpieces, but it might be a little more up and down… Station to Station is more consistently weird, dark, and fascinating. But I may be suffering from the recency effect here. This is a good debate to revisit.