David Bowie
"Hours..."

THE REVIEW

The Duke's White Hours,

We believed that David Bowie in the '90s was building a mosaic and that "Buddha Of Suburbia", "1.Outside", and "Earthling" were excellent pieces to which "Hours..." should be added. Evidently, we believed wrongly, as with this release, the former Duke shatters all expectations (hasn't he always done so?) and delivers something very soft and nostalgic with few brilliant moments and many others very weak.

The cover already tells us a lot: the Bowie of '99 holds in his arms and lowers his eyes upon a sort of Ziggy-Nathan Adler lying and agonizing who, in turn, looks beyond the cover, perhaps towards a distant past or the immediate future. The graphics are somewhat futuristic, somewhat hospital-like, and the album overall gives the idea of something sickly, not sick as "1.Outside" could have been, but rather vaguely desperate and disillusioned.
Already from "Thursday's Child," the opening track and successful single that swings between choirs and strings, we feel that all the lyrics and arrangements are imbued with regrets: David talks to us about lost loves, wasted days, and poorly filled solitudes, using music that somewhat wants to wink at the past (towards "Hunky Dory" critics of the time said, but I was never convinced), somewhat build the pop sound of the future, made of cold, icy, crystalline atmospheres, like those of the white room where the cover is set. From the artist's words emerges a life made of indecisions, of wrong choices at the wrong times, and the muffled sounds of the album, from Reeves Gabrels' guitars to Mark Plati's mixing, seem to suggest these themes: there are acoustic gems like "Survive" and "Seven", heart-wrenching memories of times long past like "Something In The Air" and "If I'm Dreaming My Life". At times, the author tries to convince himself that he's still a dragon and a drug, as in the crashing electricity of "The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell", but the results are rather monotonous and laughable. The same effect is unfortunately created by the instrumental "Brilliant Adventure", a pseudo-reference to an eastern Berlin.
If so far the album has been listenable without praise or blame, the irritating episodes "What's Really Happening" and "New Angels Of Promise" plunge this poorly-leavened "electro-pop" (?) mixture into the irritating annoyance of wanting to turn off the stereo. Fortunately, the fake-Eno electronics of the final track "The Dreamers" saves us, lifting the general sense of disorientation and yawning of this work by half a notch (and half a notch is little!).

In the summer of 1999, I got to know Bowie thanks to the film "Velvet Goldmine" and an early passion for glam, and this "Hours...", released in the fall of that same year, was his first album that I bought "live", so at the time I was very enthusiastic and appreciated it quite a bit. Since I'm attached to it and it somewhat reminds me of the atmospheres of that high school period, made of neon sleeps, indecisions, and endless hours, you must understand how sorry I am to speak about it this way, but I find it difficult to do otherwise especially knowing that it was preceded by the brilliant "Earthling" and followed by the splendid "Heathen".

from "Something In The Air"

Lived with the best times
Left with the worst
I've danced with you too long
Nothing left to say
Let's take what we can
I know you hold your head up high
We've raced for the last time
A place of no return.