David Bowie - Blackstar

The album Blackstar is at once luxuriant and harrowing, lyrical and relentless. The title track is an expansive and abstruse mood-epic in the vein of the title track to Bowie’s 1977 album Station to Station. Both essentially centre around a submerged sense of menace, and both incorporate highly complex, ‘difficult’ lyrics replete with recondite allusions and imagery. Both work in movements, although ‘Blackstar’ is tripartite and circular while ‘Station to Station’ is bipartite and linear (if we exclude the intro, at least).

However, whereas ‘Station to Station’ is ebullient and allows scope for optimism, ‘Blackstar’ is fully consonant with Bowie’s foreknowledge of his own death in its macabre lyricism and profusive bleakness- the pop equivalent of a Gothic cathedral. ‘’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’, the second track, is a baroque nightmare bop complete with allusions to Jacobean revenge tragedy in its title, and the swooning saxophones of ‘Lazarus’ lull the listener into a state of fevered trance. Indeed, the whole album is an attempt to craft just the right disjointed and melancholy swansong for Bowie’s lives and music. It succeeds.