It’s impossible to review ★ (Blackstar), David Bowie’s 25th and, devastatingly, last album, in any subjective way given the tragic events that have passed since its release. Lyrics, especially from the title track and “Lazarus”, are now refracted through his death and are hard to interpret without his illness in mind. But, for the record, I bought the record on the morning it was released, and I already thought it was fantastic. Like he’s done with soul, with glam, with krautrock and with so many other styles of music, Bowie has taken a musical genre (in this case, jazz), and made it totally his own.
Bowie succumbed to a cancer – which he had kept private for 18 months – only two days after the release of what would turn out to be his final album. The outpouring of grief on social media and on the streets reveals that each person’s relationship with David Bowie is deeply personal. Bowie’s music, particularly “Heroes”, is integral to my relationship with my parents and brother, and to my relationship with music itself. Based on the touching tributes that have flooded the globe, there are millions around the world who have similar connections to the great man.
The Thin White Duke’s catalogue is also so vast and so visibly demarcated by radically different sounds and looks that you could get 10 die hard fans in a room and the chances are they’ll all have different favourite albums, and even favourite periods of his career. The album that turns out to be his swansong does his career justice by looking back to these periods and albums that we all love dearly while also, amazingly for an artist of his vast range and back catalogue, creating sounds we haven’t ever heard from him.
★ begins with an eerie 10 minute title track, saturated in gloomy and morbid imagery that will now be read as references to his own death. But the music itself is fascinating, as the song shapeshifts from an eerie Gregorian chant into a throbbing mixture of disco and blue eyed soul. The high quality of the opening song is maintained in the absolutely bizarre “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”, the song where Bowie makes the most use of his jazz backing band and in “Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)”, which sounds like a spy movie theme on steroids. But the standout track of the album is “Lazarus”, widely regarded as Bowie’s final testament, a gorgeous song that is by turns haunting (the line ‘Look up here, I’m in heaven’ in particular) and playful, a side to the song that comes out in the simultaneously morbid and droll music video.
The rest of ★ finds Bowie both looking back and forward: the lyrics of “Girl Loves Me”, partially written in the fictional urban patois of the novel A Clockwork Orange, finds Bowie engaging in the kind of deliberately strange singing that we’ve only really heard before on “It’s No Game (Part 1)” from Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. Similarly, “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away” incorporate new, saxophone driven jazz sounds into Bowie’s music while also dipping into the past: “Dollar Days” contains pastoral and sentimental references to Bowie’s homeland, while the opening of the beautiful final track is an echo of the electronica of “Low”. In short, Bowie’s last album does what he always does best – it presents his past in a way that is totally locked in to the here and now.
The most comforting thing about ★ is that it’s totally, uncompromisingly, Bowie. Even in the throes of his illness, he has made a record that, like his best, continues the ideas of his other work – the themes of alienness and excess have permeated his catalogue – while forging a new path. Bowie has always been totally forward-facing, even when he was looking into the past. He has always been unafraid of presenting his work without apologies or concessions to mainstream trends. ★ is the best possible parting gift, because it shows that Bowie’s lust for life never abated, and he was totally committed to his art until the very end. While the Starman himself might be no more, this album is a perfect reminder that his gift to humanity will never die.
Review Score: 9.3 out of 10.
★ is out now.
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