Album Review: David Bowie "Blackstar"

5 out of 5

This is without a doubt the heaviest album I've ever heard: dark, brooding, pensive and wrought with despair. I can't readily think of any other album where an artist was faced with their own impending death and put out this kind of work, both in quality and content.
What I find so haunting here (and yes, this album is unnervingly haunting) is that it's permeated with the feeling like Bowie looked into the abyss and saw nothing. Where an artist like Warren Zevon released the sad-but-poignant "hey I had a good run" album "The Wind" before passing away, David Bowie seems to be clawing tooth and nail at the reality of his situation. Songs like "Girl Loves Me" pulse with throbbing bass lines and synths while the repeating phrase "where the fuck did Monday go?" centers itself as the songs theme, which is especially creepy given that he died on a Sunday night. Elsewhere, songs like "Lazarus" show a man who's lamenting his own mortality set to discordant guitars, rolling bass and deflated horns punctuated by the refrain "just like that bluebird I'll be free", even though it's hard to tell if that's a statement he actually believed.
There's nothing even remotely celebratory here, just the kind of mourning that usually spawns vengeful ghosts in Asian horror movies. "I Can't Give Everything Away" bookends the record and rightly sums up the existential mood that permeates these songs with the couplet: "I know something is very wrong, the post returns for prodigal sons". For a man like Bowie, who spent decades crafting a shifting persona dedicated to exploring all of life's excesses, the void of death seems to be the only life experience he's uneasy about.
Beyond the subject matter though is one of the best albums Bowie has ever made. Ever the creative mastermind and architect, he surrounded himself with a handful of avant garde Jazz musicians who pieced together an album so frenetic yet so cohesive that it would be a staggering work on its own without Bowie's input and brand all over it.
It's a depressingly sad creation, and in its own way kinda scary (I can't be the only person expecting a frail David Bowie to crawl out of every armoire I see and erratically fiddle around the room before disappearing back into it, right?) but it's also exhilarating. Artists rarely get masterpieces this late in their careers and the biggest shame is that Bowie isn't here to see the impact it's had.