Amazon.co.uk review
Youth, as the old adage goes, is wasted on the young, although surely
Reality highlights the ambiguously chameleonic and now comfortably middle-aged David Bowie as an honourable exception to the rule, a man whose soul and creative metre endures to pursue eternal youth within the accelerating self-awareness of his own mortality. Times were when he'd never get away with it.
In recent years Bowie has had a frustrating tendency to handle his own past with varying degrees of bemusement--whether to suffer it, stroke it, spit on it or merely borrow from it (some of Reality's best tracks, the quasi-political "Fall Dog Bomb the Moon" and the electronic punk of "New Killer Star", both shadow his past while exploring the neurosis of our post-9/11 world) while, in a manner most unbecoming of one of rock's most eminent pace-makers, he's chased juvenescent pop fads like some Botox-injecting fashionista. However, Reality, much like its immediate predecessor, the highly-regarded Heathen (Tony Visconti remains at the production helm), finds Bowie reacclimatising to his muse and his life--both as an Englishman in New York and as a doomed rider on the proverbial storm of existence--just beautifully. There are home truths and cognitive mirror gazes on the title track, a sleazy roughed-up diamond with Johnny Rotten-ish cackles and squawky guitars on which he casts a conciliatory glance towards his previous rock & roll personae and despairs at how he "hid amongst the junk of wretched highs" whereas the equally excellent and morbidly cheery "Never Get Old" (musically, imagine a more flippantly sing-along "Sound and Vision") is as comically fatalistic as a two-fingered salute from a retirement home window.
Despite cracking a wicked smile on a rampant strut through Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso", Reality favours brooding philosophising over light-hearted chuckles--see "Looking for Water", the dramatic grand piano and images of dislocated metropolitan topography on the 'Loneliest Guy" and the sullen dying breath of "Bring Me the Disco King"--but Bowie admits to being just like the rest of us in not having the answers. Still, Reality consolidates Bowie's artistic rehabilitation and ranks as another fine album from a man still willing to ask questions of himself. --Kevin Maidment
CD Description
The Thin White Duke returns with his 26th album, the follow-up to 2002's 'Heathen'. Produced once again by longtime collaborator Tony Visconti, this is a more musically diverse and harder rocking offering and includes covers of the Modern Lovers' 'Pablo Picasso' and George Harrison's 'Try Some Buy Some', as well as the track 'Bring Me The Disco King' which is featured on the OST of vampire flick 'Underworld'.
