Sloth

OK, it’s not actually new to me: I’ve been a Bowie freak ever since I was a young lad. My entry point, like it was for everybody I’d wager, was Ziggy Stardust, but basically everything the man did in that entire decade is pure gold. I’m hardly the first to suggest this, but I think Bowie has the record for longest streak of brilliant albums released consecutively, staring with Hunky Dory and going all the way to Scary Monsters.

But while the glam stuff is what pulled me in, the heart of Bowie I think are in the three albums known as the Berlin Trilogy: Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger. Helped by a bevy of collaborators, (Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Carlos Alomar), the trilogy scales heights that, sadly, Bowie never topped. Mind you, the strange mixes of wildly disparate elements, combined with the alien sounds of Eno’s racks of electronics, would be tough for anybody to have topped.

“Heroes” is the best known of the trilogy due to it’s title track, which rightfully became a Bowie standard, and if pressed, I’d admit that Lodger is the best of the trilogy because the songcraft is so great, but Low is my fave. I still remember the chills it gave me the first time I listened to it, after finding a budget cassette release at the K-Mart in Welland if I’m remembering correctly. (Low and “Heroes” are great to listen to on cassette, by the way, because of the way they separate themselves into songs on one side, ambient weirdness on the other.) I loved the cover, because the red-haired Man Who Fell To Earth Bowie is, I think, the absolute coolest incarnation. But the music! Holy fuck, right from the first strains of “Speed Of Life”, Low just grabs you. If Ziggy Stardust was about being from another planet, Low bested it because it sounds like it came from another planet, like a night on the town at the hottest disco on Pluto. Bowie’s voice is all over the place, sometimes chilly and distant, sometimes overly close and up front in the mix. The songs on the first side are short, looking forward to the punk/new-wave movement that Low, in part, helped to inspire. Lyrically, Bowie seems at his most direct and blunt, sketching tales of modern alienation, although not without a dark streak of humour: “You’re such a wonderful person / But you’ve got problems”.

In later years, I would come to realize that much of the sound of Low and “Heroes” was a direct musical response to such Krautrock pioneers as Kraftwerk and Neu!, but that doesn’t diminish the many pleasures of this album for me, because it has such a specific tone. Nobody else but Bowie could have done an album like this in the 70s, because nobody else would have dared.