Review Summary: Dance, Bowie, Dance!!!
David Bowie always staked an impressive claim to the title of musical chameleon, but the nineties saw him hopping from genre to genre even more than usual. Starting with the jazzy
Black Tie White Noise, he then moved to bleak, textural landscapes with
Outside in 1995, before Mr Jones slipped on his red shoes and danced the blues with 1997’s
Earthling.
Earthling marks another change in direction, seeing Bowie experiment with Jungle and Drum ‘n’ Bass elements, perhaps in a move intended to bring him up alongside contemporaries such as Goldie and The Prodigy. Before one rushes to reach through the monitor and slap Bowie’s Union Jack-suited face for hopping on another band wagon, it’s important to state that
Earthling is far from just another stale, uncreative dance album.
Although a few cuts do feature fast 160bmp counts, the majority of the tracks aren’t as breakneck as certain misleading journalists would like to overstate. In fact the album takes almost as many twists and turns as a ‘normal’ Bowie record, only this time the songs are backed by steady dance beats, not traditional rhythm sections. Once one gets ones head around the fact that the Thin White Duke has decided to get his ecstasy-fuelled groove on, and when such a change of direction is accepted, then
Earthling’s 9 tracks suddenly begin to offer a surprising amount of pleasure for open-minded listeners.
What makes it all work is the way that the numbers are constructed. The songs aren’t boring, sample-driven dance tunes without imagination or creativity, but rather the opposite. In a genre as frequently dull as dance,
Earthling’s approach of blending traditional and electronic instruments and utilising said tools in interesting ways is more refreshing and satisfying than most of the genres artists. The drums are a combination of samples and live beats, each layered onto top of each other; the guitars are equally as pondered – the riffs were recorded live then put into a synthesiser so they could be constructed electronically, adding to
Earthling’s approach of seamlessly blending real and fake sounds.
It all comes together on tracks such as the nervy, grinding ‘I’m Afraid Of Americans’, the pulsing ‘Dead Man Walking’, the crawling ‘Seven Years In Tibet’, which progresses from rigid electro shudders into furious outbursts of distorted guitar towards its tail end; and the scene-setting, ‘Little Wonder’. None of the tracks are as instantly gratifying as his 70s material, but they do have a real kick to them and are genuinely well crafted dance numbers – they’re all vocal tracks too, before certain fans begin to worry that the album is absent from its creators tangible presence.
It’s all very solid and enjoyable, but at the same time, one must question whether a dance-flavoured incarnation of David Bowie was what the fans wanted.
Earthling is well-made for sure, but at the end of the day, when one thinks of Bowie and what’s great about his musicianship the word ‘dance’ certainly doesn’t jump to mind, and that’s precisely why
Earthling is both satisfying and underwhelming, as odd as such a notion seems. Its consistency and tact cannot be faulted, but its necessity and overall importance in the shaping of Bowie’s musical portrait can perhaps be debated. Conclusively,
Earthling is enjoyable but skipable - personal preference serving as the only sound critical advice that truly matters when deciding whether the album should find a place on your record shelf or not.
