David Bowie’s 2013 album ‘The Next Day’ broke a ten year silence. It was released with a huge fanfare, but absolutely no build up. That an artist of Bowie’s stature could complete an album in absolute secrecy is surprising. That he managed to do so in a world that’s constantly connected via an internet of rumours and with a media reporting every notable (and often less notable) celebrity’s every cough is astounding. ‘The Next Day’ was a good, but sometimes ordinary album. Its follow up, ‘Blackstar’ – released at the beginning of 2016 – is anything but ordinary. This, Bowie’s twenty-fifth (proper) studio album, is his darkest since 1995’s ‘1.Outside’ (the first chapter of the subsequently aborted Nathan Adler Diaries). It would be easy to say it is also his coldest work since the Eno-drenched second side of ‘Low’, but despite the darkness, ‘Blackstar’ is often touching in its bleakness. It’s low-key songs are riddled with refection and emotion, the final public words of a legend about to say goodbye to the world. But, of course, on the 8th January – the album’s official release date – this was not clear to anyone except David and those very close to him.
DAVID BOWIE (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016)
Few figures were as influential within popular music as David Bowie. He not only knew how to pen distinctive songs, oft delivered with an even more distinctive vocal style, but he understood more than most that, to survive, constant reinvention was utterly necessary.
Pretty much no-one would have guessed that from David Jones’s first musical steps with R&B and his bands The King Bees and Lower Third, he would soon reinvent himself as a flippant music-hall act on his much overlooked ‘David Bowie’ debut of 1967. There’s even less there to suggest that the glam rock starman Ziggy Stardust’ was lurking around the corner preparing himself for world domination.
SKULLCAVE – Climbing EP
Rarely was a band more aptly named. It takes about three seconds before this second EP from Australia’s Skullcave sets about caving in listeners’ skulls. These guys not only know their way around an enormous riff, but also know how to make the simplest riffs sound truly frightening.
RAGE OF ANGELS – Dreamworld
Already home to the Phenomena project (a collective whose 2010 release may be a career high point for that particular collective) and the much lesser-known and lesser-talented Sebastien, British melodic rock label Escape Music is no stranger to big “all-star” gatherings. The beginning of 2013 saw the label release ‘Dreamworld’ by Rage of Angels, another all-chums-together offering, this time masterminded by ex-Ten keyboard player Ged Rylands.
1968 – 1968 EP
1967’s supposed summer of love and its psychedelic, swirling colourful world was never going to last forever. 1968, by contrast, was darker and less flamboyant, a time of unrest. Students rioted in Paris, while the psychedelic pop of yesteryear was beginning to wane in favour of harder stuff. Often abreast of the mood of the pop-culture sphere, we only have to look at The Beatles output from this time to get a brief glimpse of the general changes in attitude. In a short time, they’d gone from lush, complex pop to a starker and altogether colder musical mood, a good chunk of the fourth side of their sprawling double set from 1968 devoted to near-impenetrable tape loops and cut-ups. Hendrix, too, had experimented with denser sounds on ‘Electric Ladyland’ than either of his previous two albums, while The Doors’ general circus of dystopia was at its peak. 1968 was arguably the year when pop begat hard rock. Fitting, then, with a whole arsenal of retro sounds at their disposal, that this trio from Cheshire should choose “1968” as their band name. Their sounds look backwards a time when the blues came with a mass of distortion and the world-changing Black Sabbath were lurking just over the horizon.