David Bowie
Lodger

THE REVIEW

Final Contaminations

or the "thunder ocean" that nobody expected

This mid-October evening is ideal for writing something about "Lodger". Okay, let's begin. Where were we?
Recap of the previous episode: in 1977 Bowie records "Heroes", the second Berlin album, and in 1978 begins the related "Stage" tour, which we have documented in a double live album. After four months the tour stops, we find ourselves in Montreux and...

Bowie decides to start working on a new album, the last piece of his therapy, the final proof of his reborn creativity and his abilities as an innovative author. I know well that most fans and experts consider "Lodger" a minor and disappointing work, but in my opinion, it doesn't betray expectations, and now I'll try to explain my point of view.

The last time we turned around we saw the artist running and screaming through the streets of Berlin in a completely shattered mental, spiritual, and physical state: he has almost definitively abandoned the comfort of cocaine and has been elevated once again to idol status by his electronic roads. Due to the void and the full he created, he risks a relapse into the old image-mythology-drug dependencies and a possible lack of inspiration. Here lies the whole essence of "Lodger": this album is a new turning point, another escape, in a sense even more extreme than "Heroes". Bowie rediscovers the song form and the classic structure of pop-rock, but what he offers us is not a refined album of songs. The singer, along with Brian Eno (but the strength of the partnership is waning) and new guitarist Adrian Belew, once again disrupts the sense of music and proposes something completely different from everything we could expect from him. Did you believe in a new half-sung, half-instrumental album? Sorry! Were you expecting a simple collection of songs that restores the normal order of things? Sorry again!
The dark Berlin balance dissolves into ten extraordinary, destabilizing songs, with a thousand scents and a thousand contaminations. In "Lodger" you can find everything you couldn't even imagine until now, for example, the desperate yet airy pop of "Fantastic Voyage". And indeed, this CD is a fantastic journey because among the ethnic insertions we find the nocturnal and extremely fast exotic delirium of "African Night Flight" or the Turkish reggae of "Yassassin". And in the engaging "Move On" I seem to hear the chorus of "All The Young Dudes" backward, inviting us once again to undertake the so-called journey, a shift towards the frenzied rhythms of "Red Sails" or the critique of "D.J.", "my natural reaction to disco music", a song ironically anti-Western, anti-commercial, anti-Bowie!
But if you really want to return to relatively more conventional paths, then blast max volume with the pearls "Look Back In Anger" and "Boys Keep Swinging", two of the most original and energetic singles of our artist. The guitars run off the rails and create frenzied paths, the singer's voice reaches heights and depths of electropop apocalypse. While Gary Numan climbs the charts with "Heroes" attitudes and the entire pop new wave awakens, Bowie has already moved elsewhere and destroys every convention and past image, mocks the new youth and what he himself was, which will become more evident in the following "Scary Monsters And Super Creeps"... and when we think we've heard it all, here comes the hypnotic blues of "Repetition".

The album, and the whole "Berlin" experience, closes (but is it really closed?) with "Red Money", a mechanical ballad sister to "Sister Midnight" (Iggy Pop) that in my opinion secretly reprises the stylistic elements of "Low". But if you're looking for musical and thematic circularity, you'll be disappointed because it's precisely here that the "canceled project that falls central" is denounced. "Can you feel it fall? Like a nervous disease, it's been there all this time, and will fall from the sky". We hear it well, but not for long, because it's time to break down the Wall... of sound; Berlin has given everything it could, the music has changed forever. Is rock still rock? Is salvation such when innocence is lost? Who has the responsibility to decide how far a song is a song? The divergence with Brian Eno is now total, here David Bowie suggests a response opposite to the one I avoided in the review of "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)": "Such responsibility it's up to you and me". Saying it, he turns around, changes direction, and with the corner of his eye, we manage to catch a sly smile...

from "Look Back In Anger"
"You know who I am," he said
The speaker was an angel
He coughed and shook his crumpled wings
Closed his eyes and moved his lips
"It's time we should be going"
ps: as I already wrote at the end of "Low" and "Heroes", I propose the in-depth exploration of "Uncut" titled "Trans-Europe Excess", visitable at these pages courtesy of velvet goldmine :
uncut 1
uncut 2
uncut 3
uncut 4