REALITY: REVIEWS

 

UNCUT MAGAZINE
By Chris Roberts

BOWIE REMAINS THE GREATEST living rock artist, even if what he does isn't rock so much as swing, think a bit, then swing again. Heathen really was a return to form - even objective people thought so. Reunited with Tony Visconti for the first time since Scary Monsters, he threw aside his well-intended but increasingly flailing attempts at 'relevant' sonic shifts and stepped back into himself. He's much more dignified when he's irrelevant, unique, alien. Heathen was alternately broody and buoyant, imaginative without being esoteric, and filled with fine songs. Wisely, Bowie's stayed with Visconti - and with the same band - for his 26th LP, written and recorded quickly this year in New York. And while it's very much a rock album - "a bit thrusty" is his own description - it kicks in a very 'now' way (this ain't Tin Machine). Over its stomping drums and squalling guitars he drapes lovely, left-handed songs, rich with unexpected angles, daring detours and words which muse over mortality yet emerge seeming upbeat. Reality is lyrically mournful; musically euphoric. It's pop, frisky pop, but with plenty of couplets about how everything falls away. "New Star Killer" begins; a riff, a pulse, a yelp in the voice as he nails it: "Oh my nuclear baby/Oh my idiot trance/All my idiot questions/Let's face the music and dance..." He's racing from or towards something, with a hint of Ballard's Crash. "Never Get Old" plays with his past personae; chunky funk, it ends like a spooky fairground ride. "There's never gonna be enough money, there's never gonna be enough drugs, and I'm never gonna get old." The album's littered with both quips and sighs about time passing. There are two covers, Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso" (in the manner of The Pixies) and George Harrison's "Try Some, Buy Some" (in the manner of Ronnie Spector, giving it the big yodel). "The Loneliest Guy" ease the tempo, quivers in like early Roxy, has a narrator denying his loneliness despite giveaway phrases like "pictures on my hard drive". "Looking For Water" - "I can't live in this cage, can't eat this candy" - thuds in again with braggadocio, but there's a sort of a capella moment which recalls those blissful Young Americans peaks, and the lines: "I lost God in a New York minute/I don't know about you, but my heart's not in it". "Days" is a bit plinky-plonk, but both "She'll Drive The Big Car" and "Fall Dog Bombs The Moon" are schizo, ferocious but fractured, the former like "The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan" reqritten by Iggy, the latter a scratching, twisting, martial "Heroes". Both should enter the all-time Bowie pantheon, given that's a pretty huge building. The title track is heavy, pounding - perhaps, like "Hallo Spaceboy", too much so - and cranium-piercing. "Now my death is just a sad song" begs reference to his Brel days, and, "I've been right and I've been wrong/Now I'm back where I started from" contradics the pierrot who'd never done good things or bad things. Any lingering scepicism is sucked away by the startling, jazzy snake that is "Bring Me The Disco King", which he's been tampering with for a decade. Nearly eight minutes long, it's like Sinatra or Scott Walker tilting at Brubeck's "Take Five", Mike Garson on avant-pano, many-limbed percussion; our man reminiscing about "killing time in the '70s....rivers of perfumed limbs, good time girls" before fearing invisibility and our ultimate "dance through the fire". Ah, it was a very good year. It's a very, very good sexy-angst album. For real.


 
Q MAGAZINE
By Garry Mulholland

ARCH DUKE
AT LAST, HE'S BEGUN TO IMPROVE WITH AGE.
When you leave Bowie's 26th studio album, Reality, behind, it's the "I don't know about you" refrain of closer Bring Me The Disco King that won't leave you alone. And it's true-after over 30 years of living on Planet David Bowie, he probably doesn't know anything about us. But at last half of Reality sounds like a guy who's at least interested in talking to us again. Much like real reality, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed, million-selling Heathen begins in confusion amid business as usual, before revelations bring moments of clarity_and Bowie's best music since Scary Monsters. Recorded in New York with his touring band-his most enduring creative partner, producer (and bassist) Tony Visconti, vocalist Gail Ann Dorsey, pianist Mike Garson, drummer Sterling Campbell and guitarist Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard-the 49-minute, 11-track set edges towards excellence gradually, as if finding purpose and point through shedding layers of artifice. The vague references to current violent events contained within the likes of Fall Dog Bombs The Moon and New Killer Star are rather undercut by a tuneless cover of Jonathan Richman's Pablo Picasso and the fussy, self-referential irony of Never Get Old, a "co-promotion" (whatever that means) with Vittel Water which heavily features the line "There's never gonna be enough money". But Evian may be slow to co-promote the likes of the Iggy-tributing title track, the dramatically weary The Loneliest Guy, beautiful but disquieting George Harrison/Ronnie Spector cover Try Some, Buy Some, and the exquisite moody jazz ballad of Bring Me The Disco King, with their ambivalence toward old age, amusement and anger at Manhattan excess, and somewhat confessional take on the lie of the pleasure culture. If Bowie's great '70s era was buoyed by a reckless hedonist adventure followed by an elegantly exhausted ennui, then the best of Reality sounds like a man coming to terms with what was lost in those mad years and the saving graces of love and stability. The 56-year-old family man here still sounds on the side of the young dudes. But Bowie did get old. And, in Reality, it suits him. ****

 
BILLBOARD MAGAZINE
By W.O.

Through his recent deal with Columbia, David Bowie can issue a new record pretty much whenever he wants. And, based on "Reality" (which comes fairly quickly on the heels of last year's "Heathen"), some might say that is not necessarily a good thing: While there are a few sly lines and flashes of that sinfully cool Bowie attitude (especially on the addictive "She Drives the Big Car," the album's best cut), these songs feel thin and not always memorable. On the eve of his first world tour in more than a decade, he and his touring band created these tracks with the stage in mind. And one feels that: So many of them are propelled by sharp drumming and throbbing basslines. The Sept. 11, 2001-inspired "New Killer Star" and the Modern Lovers cover "Pablo Picasso" should prove exhilarating live. The smoky, set-ending "Bring Me the Disco King," on which Bowie has toiled for more than a decade, is a delight.

 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
By Marc Weingarten

Where have you gone, Thin White Duke? Where is that savoir faire, that cool elegance and total command of craft that made you one of rock's most compelling figures all those years ago? There is trace evidence of David Bowie's former self on his new CD, Reality, but certainly not enough to warrant a hearty ''hip, hip, hooray!'' from long-suffering loyalists who wait in vain for Bowie to throw down with an album that's as worthy as his brilliant work of the '70s.

''Reality'''s core flaw is the same one that has marred Bowie's work since 1993's ''Black Tie White Noise'': studio-slick production that drowns even the best musical ideas in digitally processed canola oil. Bowie simply can't stop tinkering with his arrangements, piling on so many synthesized strings, chiming guitars, and reverb-heavy bass lines that they begin to take on the awful sheen of remedial '80s pop. Surprising, then, to find that ''Reality'' was co-produced by Tony Visconti, the man in the control booth during the making of great Bowie records like ''Low'' and ''Heroes.'' If any musical icon could benefit from the indie-rock analog treatment, it's Bowie (paging Steve Albini...).

The writing on ''Reality'' is an improvement over Bowie's previous few albums -- less banal, more heartfelt. A handful of the songs seem to address post-9/11 emotional and spiritual dislocation. ''I lost God in a New York minute/I don't know about you but my heart's not in it,'' Bowie sings on ''Looking for Water.'' On ''New Killer Star,'' he witnesses a ''great white scar over Battery Park'' and tries to find some solace in ''the stars in your eyes.'' But it's not until the last track that Bowie proves he's still capable of summoning some of the eerie drama of yore. An after-hours elegy for club crawlers, ''Bring Me the Disco King'' slinks seductively to pianist Mike Garson's tinkling angularities and a brushed snare, and features Bowie at his crooning, brooding best. Ground control to Major Tom: Ditch the new reality and go back to the old school. EW Grade: C+


 

NEW ZEALAND HERALD
By Russel Baillie

He's wasted no time in following up last year's Heathen, the first album of his in an age, where the bold concepts which overbaked and quickly dated much of his 90s output didn't get in the way.

It was a David Bowie album on which he sounded like David Bowie without trying too hard, having found a way to balance his artistic legacy, his position as spry but mid-fiftysomething music veteran, his lateral way with a song - his or someone else's - and it showed he wasn't tired of rock'n'roll.

It worked. It even sold a million copies to fans who may have finally forgiven him the sins of his 80s.

And here, it sounds like Bowie has figured it's a trick worth repeating.

Reality would seem to be very much Heathen's sequel and nearly its equal. Though it's not as cohesive, and it does sound more like Bowie-and-band, with his regular live backing group - the ones he's rumoured to be bringing to Western Springs in February on a world tour which is concentrating on his greatest hits - helping to give this a funky, wired feel reminiscent in parts of 1975's soul set Young Americans and 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) .

....It all makes for an intriguing set. One that may not have quite the focus of Heathen, but shows the Bowie of the noughties is making better albums than the erratic output of his previous two decades. (Herald rating * * * *)


 

WASHINGTON TIMES
By Russel Baillie

"The Loneliest Guy," a standout track on David Bowie's latest album, "Reality," sounds like Radiohead imitating David Bowie, with clubby electronics and reverb-y, minor-key melancholia. Most of the time, though, "Reality" sounds like David Bowie imitating David Bowie - of whom there are several.

There's David Bowie the soulful lounge crooner ("Bring Me the Disco King"); the singer-songwriter ("Days"); the densely produced, anthemic "Let's Dance" pop king ("Never Get Old"); the trashy guitar rocker (the title track).

At 56, Mr. Bowie has tried just about everything. With Ziggy Stardust, he perfected visually driven glam rock. He experimented in the late '70s with electronica before it became the rage; in the '80s, he returned to earth with conventional pop rock. He anticipated grunge rock in 1989 with his Tin Machine project.

"Reality" is a survey of all these different Bowies, with a couple quirky covers (Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso" and the late George Harrison's "Try Some, Buy Some") thrown in for good, why-not measure.

Too contemporary sounding to bear comparisons to classics such as "Hunky Dory," "Reality," at its accessible best, harks back to Mr. Bowie's more inspired work of the early '80s ("Scary Monsters," for example).

Some may recoil from the hectic arrangements and glossy production of "Reality"(longtime Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti co-helms), but songs such as "Fall Dog Bombs the Moon," an abstract slap at fat cats, and "New Killer Star," the album's first single, come pretty close to reproducing Mr. Bowie's idiosyncratic magnetism: cheerless but tuneful melodies, aggressive guitars, impressionistic lyrics. "Never Get Old" finds Mr. Bowie renouncing consumerism: "There's never gonna be enough money / There's never gonna be enough drugs."

On the propulsive "Looking for Water," God disappears in a "New York minute." On the elegiac "The Loneliest Guy," Mr. Bowie sings of middle-age regret ("All the pages that have turned / All the errors left unlearned"). On "Days," the regret is romantic: "All you gave you gave for me / I gave nothing in return."

The cover of all this existential distress depicts a boyish Mr. Bowie with big blue Japanimation eyeballs - a picture of frozen innocence, a protest against all the grizzled, later-in-life "Reality" found within. David Bowie seems to be losing experimental steam nowadays, but "Reality" confirms happily that he can stay busy ransacking himself for years to come.