David Bowie
Blackstar

Whenever a new David Bowie album is released, words and especially adjectives abound. The writer of this review is 29 years old, a young man who has had the fortune of personally witnessing the release of a new Bowie album only a few times, exactly three times in 15 years of Bowie fandom. Yet, once again, the White Duke surprises, a Bowie totally different from the one we listened to in the previous “The Next Day”: where the artist opted for a musical language that recalled his past, particularly the first half of the seventies, Bowie decides here not to be reassuring, to sail in open seas, to challenge the waves. He goes back to being that somewhat aloof and perhaps a bit presumptuous artist who experiments, who takes risks, who pushes beyond, reminiscent of the famous Berlin period.

The words of producer Tony Visconti are enough to understand what territory we're in: "Bowie wanted jazz musicians to play rock. Having jazz guys play rock means turning everything upside down. In this album, we put in anything, we wanted something fresh with the aim of avoiding pure rock'n'roll."

The new band accompanying Bowie (jazz guitarist Ben Monder, drummer Mark Giuliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre, Jason Lindner on keyboards, and on only two tracks, LCD Soundsystem founder James Murphy, on percussion) offers his music a practically new perspective and viewpoint, a musical depth, also in terms of virtuosity: they are jazz musicians interpreting Bowie's music, thus providing him with different and unusual tints and sounds. A striking example is the track “Sue - Or In A Season Of Crime” or even the strange, dark, dreamlike title track, 10 minutes of continuous changes in tone, both musically and vocally, which many critics have not hesitated to compare to the most experimental Scott Walker.

He emerges with his voice, which, while having lost some power and range, is used with incredible mastery, expressiveness, and a great “theatrical” force, offering the vocal instrument different nuances than in the past.

The album has a strong internal stylistic coherence, making it a complex and unified project, despite the heterogeneous origins of the individual tracks: there is no "patchwork" effect that was somewhat the limitation of “The Next Day.” Each element fits perfectly with the previous and the next one, designing the musical landscape Bowie wanted to offer us. An album that unfolds gradually, where each listening offers new elements, despite its short duration (just 41 minutes, only 7 songs, of which 2 were already published in the 2014 compilation “Nothing Has Changed,” here re-elaborated for the occasion).

It is an album that alternates moments where the virtuosic element dominates, as in the sound whirlwinds of the splendid “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” a piece with an almost drum’n’bass base, or in the theatrical jewel that is “Girl Loves Me,” with moments where there's an emotional strength that Bowie has rarely let go so freely: I think of “Lazarus,” a sort of noise-rock that plays with blues laced with noir atmospheres, I think of the beautiful “Dollar Days,” or also the ballad “I Can't Give Everything Away,” which closes the album in a way diametrically opposite to how it was opened by the title track: there was a dark, gothic, gloomy, melancholic atmosphere, here the saxophone, the guitar - and what a guitar! - the light rhythm, draw an airy, bright atmosphere, at times tinged with a sweet nostalgia.

“Blackstar” is an album that adds a new chapter in Bowie's career, of which we thought we had heard everything he had to say.

But evidently, it wasn't so.