The cover of this album reads DEATH in big black letters. The heaviest of all words is soaked into each and every beat, chord and sound inside these tracks, it is so blatantly obvious that many guessed what BOWIE was trying to tell us before his actual departure on January 10th.
What you won’t find in ‘Blackstar’ is dispair. Even when he sings „I’m dying too“, BOWIE’s voice is full of silent melancholia but there’s not a hint of self pity. Such is the last work of art’s finest crafmen – a strange, dark and beautiful reflection on life’s ultimate last step.
And if we have to point at one album this year and call it undeniably honest, it has to be ‘Blackstar’. The Clear realization of impending doom has cleared all unnecessary in BOWIE and long time contributor Tony Visconti’s concept, turning the tracks into a spectacular electronic requiem, broken jazz anthems, pop songs with frightful depth. Radically different from its predecessor ‘The Next Day’, ‘Blackstar’ is smartly composed and modern, very avantgarde and yet easy to get into.
And even though the leading factor here is the voice and the vocal harmonies (check them out carefully in ‘Blackstar’ and ‘Lazarus’), BOWIE has worked with a full jazz band to achieve a rich and layered sound while gathering inspiration from “Clockwork Orange”, London gay slang and a 17th century English play. Given all these outside influences, ‘Blackstar’ sound remarkably personal – like a collection of stories, telling of the last days of a life most extraordinary.
The blackstar sound is slow and electronic, trip hop, jazzy (Donny McCaslin’s saxophone is godly), rock psychedelia and even hip hop (yes, hip hop). Overall, it’s pretty special – for we have to serach long before finding something as strange as ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’ or ‘Girl Loves Me’, the non-standard compositions of a truly non-standard artist.
The elegiac ‘Lazarus’ and the ballad ‘Dollar Days’ are probably the easiest tracks to get into as well as the album’s virtual backbone while the final song ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ puts an unusual end to the album – an almost upbeat one, despite of starting with the words „I know something’s very wrong“.
In mere days and hours after his death, BOWIE‘s ‘Blackstar’ was analyzed and dissected numerous times but its description is rather simple – it’s a brilliant album to end with and a beautiful reflection of a beautiful mind.