Mostly Genius - All 27 Bowie Studio Albums Rated
Mostly Genius
All 27 Studio Albums Rated
DAVID BOWIE 1967
★★
Stylistically, this debut had little of what was to come. Lyrically, however, on the transgender-anticipating She’s Got Medals, Bowie served fair warning of future preoccupations.
SPACE ODDITY 1969
★★★★
The moment when the road map seemed discernible for the first time, if still fairly cryptic. Letter to Hermione, the title track: to paraphrase Blackstar’s I Can’t Give Everything Away, these were the messages that he sent.
THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD 1970
★★★★
On his first collaboration with Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson, Bowie beefed up his sound and ramped up the paranoia. Somewhat “lost” compared with those that surround it, this still ranks high in some fans’ lists.
HUNKY DORY 1971
★★★★★
This, though, is where it really starts — “it” being the daring and genius that would characterise Bowie for the rest of the decade. Where to begin? Life on Mars, Oh! You Pretty Things: songs etched on our souls.
THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST... 1972
★★★★★
Loosely conceptual, wholly audacious, a swagger portrait set to music, a collision of androgyny and alien life, and songs that remain, for some, his defining moments.
ALADDIN SANE 1973
★★★★★
Carrying forward Ziggy’s cock-of-the-walk momentum and wham-bam attitude, Bowie melded high-camp melodrama, avant-garde experimentalism and strutting glam rock Drive-In Saturday, Panic in Detroit and The Jean Genie.
PIN UPS 1973
★★★
The Spiders from Mars’s last bow, this covers album is more curio than must-have, though Bowie’s readings of Sorrow, See Emily Play and I Can’t Explain shine new light on the originals.
DIAMOND DOGS 1974
★★★★
Bowie gave up on writing an album based on 1984 after problems with Orwell’s estate, but the novel’s darkness remains. Cut-up lyrics abound, as do intimations of his move into blue-eyed soul; Rebel Rebel is one of his greatest misfits’ call to arms.
YOUNG AMERICANS 1975
★★★★
This found Bowie flirting with Philadelphia soul and sounding to the manor born. It gave him his first American No 1 with Fame (co-written with John Lennon and the indispensable Carlos Alomar).
STATION TO STATION 1976
★★★★★
The result of sessions that Bowie, enslaved at the time to cocaine, claimed to have little memory of, and recorded just after he had filmed The Man Who Fell to Earth with Nicolas Roeg, his brilliant and deeply dark 10th album introduced us to the Thin White Duke and served as a sonic bridge between Young Americans and the imminent Berlin years.
LOW 1977
★★★★★
Recorded chiefly in France, yet seen as the first part of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Low marked his first collaboration with Brian Eno. A combination of jagged pop, avant-garde soul and icy instrumentals, the album vies with Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory as the fans’ favourite.
‘HEROES’ 1977
★★★★★
Robert Fripp enters the picture, lending the iconic title track its eerie menace, while Visconti, Eno (also a crucial contributor to the instrumental tracks) and the masterly combination of Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis draw out of Bowie some of the most fully realised portraits-in-song of his career.
LODGER 1979
★★★
Less experimental than its two predecessors, the final Berlin instalment divided both critics and fans, but the combination of pop immediacy with disorientating dissonance on its standouts — among them DJ and Boys Keep Swinging — still sounds thrillingly odd.
SCARY MONSTERS 1980
★★★★★
One of his most influential albums, Scary Monsters returned Bowie to the top spot with the single Ashes to Ashes. It found him taking one look at his then current art-rock and new-romantic copyists, and, on the song Teenage Wildlife, putting such pretenders firmly in their place.
LET’S DANCE 1983
★★★
Commercially by far the biggest album of Bowie’s career, Let’s Dance also marked the beginning of a hitherto unimaginable decline in his creative fortunes. The singles endure, but it would take him another nine years to come anywhere close to his earlier artistic peaks.
TONIGHT 1984
★★
The nadir, Tonight boasted one cracker in Blue Jean, but the remainder saw Bowie complacently sticking to Let’s Dance’s pop. He would later describe this period as his “Phil Collins years”.
NEVER LET ME DOWN 1987
★★
There is a sense of floundering here. The ghastly synth stabs and generic rock riffage of Day-In Day-Out are sadly typical of an album on which Bowie — Bowie! — sounds like everyone but himself.
TIN MACHINE 1989
★★
Seeking to revive his creative powers, Bowie assembled a group whose name has long been fan shorthand for his wilderness years. Worse, Reeves Gabrels, the noodling guitarist, was allowed off his leash.
TIN MACHINE II 1991
★★
By this stage, Bowie the trailblazing songwriter had pretty much disappeared, lost in a fog of sprawling, squalling and sense-deadening rock bombast. Even fanatical completists balk at this one.
BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE 1993
★★★
Hints, at last, of a revival, as Bowie reunites with Ronson and Nile Rodgers, and covers Morrissey. It’s not perfect, but, on the Scary Monsters-recalling Jump They Say, he relocates some of the dark magic.
OUTSIDE 1995
★★
Where once he could paint, briefly and vividly, a stark picture of dystopia, by 1995, reunited with Eno, Bowie turned in a 75-minute concept album that even diehard fans relegate to the lower divisions.
EARTHLING 1997
★★
Earthling saw Bowie co-opt industrial rock and drum’n’bass to try to fashion a bold new direction. With few exceptions, the venture was a failure.
‘HOURS...’ 1999
★★
Lowering the curtain on a lost creative decade, Bowie delivers another lacklustre album whose rare signs of new life are no match for its stupefied atmospherics.
HEATHEN 2002
★★★★
A new century and an album that fans, starved of sustenance, fell on like a ravenous pack. Tellingly, Bowie — working once more with Visconti — sounds himself again, his voice recalling his 1970s heyday.
REALITY 2003
★★★
Sticking with Visconti, Reality continued consigning Bowie’s 1990s doldrums to memory. Sadly, from here on in, he would go quiet. Until...
THE NEXT DAY 2013
★★★★
We’d given up by this stage. Then Bowie slipped out Where Are We Now? and the subsequent album did what we once relied on him to do: it mystified.
BLACKSTAR 2016
★★★★★
And then he faced the final curtain, and sprang his last surprise. This is inarguably great art, but for now the lyrics are heartbreaking.
R I P L E G E N D
David Robert Jones , known as David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016)
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