Member Since: 8/15/2010
Posts: 8,808
|
Critics go wild for Bowie's "Where Are We Now?"
Rolling Stone
Quote:
Well, it's about time. Posted out-of-the-blue on his website, Bowie's first release in nearly a decade – the first peek from a forthcoming LP, The Next Day, due in March – is a stirring melancholy ballad set in Berlin, with the singer reflecting on old haunts. "Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz," he croons over piano and big shimmery Eighties synths, with sad vibrato in his voice and a cryptic reference to "walking the dead." But then the bridge comes, he takes heart in the sun and the rain, and a high-pitched electric guitar soars brightly across the sky. It conjures nothing so much as the German lovers from "Heroes," walking among ghosts in a new world, hope and despair hand in hand, a moment so real you can taste it.
4/5
|
Pitchfork
Quote:
David Bowie sang about time changing him when he was still in his early 20s but you never really thought about him growing old. He's dabbled in just about every major form of popular music and, when later in his career he turned his attention to hard rock and drum'n'bass, you sensed how important it was for him to be current. Bowie keeps up-- he's an aesthete who knows what the kids are up to and has used those obsessions as a sort of spiritual Botox. But he's been quiet over the last decade; after his last album, 2003's Reality, someone threw a lollipop into his eye at a show, he had heart surgery, and he's generally laid pretty low. He was reportedly using his time to paint and draw; he grew so quiet it seemed like maybe he could no longer muster the energy for music. Which would have been perfectly fine. David Bowie has made enough brilliant music.
But then today came this single, plus the news that a new album is imminent. The beautiful thing about "Where Are We Now?" is that Bowie sounds every second of his 66 years; the tone is elegiac, his voice is weary and wise and could never be mistaken for the voice of a younger man. It's a little disconcerting at first, just how cracked and naked his singing sounds, but the scotch-soaked after-hours musical backing gives it the perfect context. "Where are we now?" is a question Bowie wouldn't have asked in the same way in the 1970s; back then he might have expected an answer but now he's old enough to understand that you never really figure it out.
|
Contact Music
Quote:
It's amazing the difference a hiatus makes in music these days - even David Bowie looks likely to feel its benefits. The explosion online that greeted the announcement of a new album in March and a new track in 'Where Are We Now?' was comfortably loud enough to suffocate the fact that, just over a decade ago, the Thin White Duke was - if not a man on the creative decline - certainly one whose profile was slipping, with 2003 LP Reality doing well initially but fading from view quickly. As did Bowie himself not long after, with health problems and the inevitable march of time apparently giving him a new perspective on life, the famous workaholic finally slowed down.
You just knew there'd be one final word though; Reality was too open-ended, too suggestive that Bowie's well wasn't quite empty yet. If many of the reams of plaudits he's received, over 40+ years of making music, for his innovation and ingenuity came about because of his intuition for picking the merest sparks of a new sonic style or trend and contorting them into his own image (see Ziggy Stardust picking up on glam, teaming up with Iggy Pop before punk broke, trekking to Berlin as Kraftwerk came to the fore), then what you can say about 'Where We You Now?' is that at 66 he's looking no further than introspectively. You'd be hard pushed to picture anyone else writing this song.
'Where Are We Now?' is a wistful, melancholic - though not downcast - ballad that lyrically appears to recall Bowie's time spent in Berlin (although apparently recorded in New York, with Berlin Trilogy producer Tony Visconti). It's a gracefully cinematic piece that puts his unique vocal at its fulcrum. Bowie sounds like Bowie should at 66 - his voice is thinner, it cracks a little, but from those fissions weep the longing and reflection that shapes the track's mood.Whilst others among the old guard like The Rolling Stones, still talk dirty in a desperate attempt to convince that we're still getting them at their testosterone-fuelled best, this is a track that maintains the hallmarks of its creator's canon - lyrical signposts, themes that are never fully decoded, questions that open up more questions - but transfigures them to the here and now. And for David Bowie, the here and now would appear to be just as enriching as it always was.
|
|
|
|
|
