Lodger by David Bowie is pretty much the shit.
So lately I’ve been doing a ton of web design and this means listening to a ton of music. I’m kind of an “album” guy. I grew up on albums. I love albums. It’s kind of a dying thing nowadays but sometimes a song sounds better within the context of the album it sits on.
Anyway, so Lodger, David Bowie’s 1979 album and the last of his famed “Berlin Trilogy”, is this amazing underrated and overlooked record. For those not familiar with David Bowie’s crazy history, here’s a quick catch-up: In 1976, David Bowie moves from L.A. to Berlin with Iggy Pop to kick his cocaine habit that L.A. had been supporting. He and Iggy Pop live together in an apartment in West Berlin and he manages to beat his addiction… but then gets addicted to heroine. And as if the story couldn’t get much more legendary, he proceeds over the next three years to produce Iggy Pop’s first two solo albums and record three records of his own that are considered now to be among his finest artistic achievements: Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger.
Low is my favorite, “Heroes” is pretty good but there are some songs that are kind of meh, and Lodger is the album that seems to get overlooked in comparison to its two predecessors, and therefore the album I somehow never got around to giving a chance… until this past weekend. It’s got some pretty amazing tracks on it like “Yassassin”, “African Night Flight”, and “DJ”. Actually, this seems to be more of a case where all the songs sound good because they’re together on this record. It also helps that it’s exactly what I’m craving right now.
Interestingly, David Bowie and producer Brian Eno tried a lot of weird recording processes to get different effects. For example, on “Boys Keep Swinging” they made drummer Dennis Davis play bass and guitarist Carlos Alomar play drums simply to force them out of their natural talents. They took Bowie’s earlier song “All The Young Dudes”, reversed the music, and wrote melodies over it to create the song “Move On”. The album ushers in a sense of world music with “Yassassin” and “African Night Flight” but it’s done with this awesome sense of taste that manages to separate them from the cringes that “world music” (just the thought of the term itself) sadly makes me feel.
Unfortunately it received some pretty mediocre to poor reviews (Rolling Stone calling it “one of his weakest … scattered, a footnote to “Heroes”, an act of marking time”) upon release but is now revered as a classic. I’d give it a listen on Grooveshark. Here’s my favorite song thus far:
