After ten years of being absent from the music scene, David Bowie returns this week with "The Next Day". Now, this is a welcome thing because I love David Bowie. He is a supremely talented artist. However, this album shows one very obvious thing: David Bowie hasn't really been working on music in this last ten years. He has been acting, he has been painting, he has been raising a daughter and he has been living life. Bowie could have easily retired, but it is also obvious that the world would not let him off the hook that easily. So, he decided to scrape together some old ideas he had laying around, and combine them with some newer stuff that he'd been working on, and the result is the new album " The Next Day". As much of the album shows, music hasn't been much of a priority for Mr. Bowie. He revisits quite a few old styles of his own, many from periods that really should have been left in the past. There are songs that sound like material from Reality, Earthling, Black Tie White Noise and even Never Let Me Down. What's scary is, I'll take songs that sound like the latter over the former any day. That's because Mr. Bowie made a crucial error in his career. In the late eighties he formed a group called Tin Machine which was supposed to be Bowie getting back to his grittier roots. Tin Machine wasn't very well received, however Tin Machine accomplished what Bowie failed to do for years to come: Be relevant and cutting edge. After Mr. Bowie decided Tin Machine was an abject failure, he obliterated it and went on to make album after album trying to jump on the trends of the moment. Here is where the Next Day seems to truly fail because Mr. Bowie decided to revisit so many styles from this era. Styles that seemed out of touch even in their time. Styles that, set in our current musical landscape, seem so far removed from anything interesting or relevant, that one can't help but think Mr. Bowie is just 'going through the motions". Therein lies the ultimate problem with The Next Day; it's an album that seems utterly uninspired. Now, granted it's not all bad. The album actually starts off strong with the first four tracks being the best. Also, How Does the Grass Grow? isn't bad and the final track 'Heat' is rather excellent. At least on this last track, Bowie is trying to do something different even though it is vaguely reminiscent of something off Outside. Taken as a whole, the album can only be defined by one word: weak. The song writing is weak, the performances are weak and most importantly the production is weak. The only thing that stands in contrast to all this weakness are the lyrics. Here, Bowie does achieve something quite good because he is actually trying to say something on a lot of these songs. Unfortunately, what he's trying to say gets buried under everything else.
