Lodger - David Bowie

After his retirement from Ziggy and his dalliance with the States and blue eyed soul music, Bowie returned with the European ballad and dance of Stationtostation before re-emerging, repackaged and re-engineered with Brian Eno with his cycle of Berlin albums. Low and Heroes were supreme works of a master back on form, and even though Lodger let the side down slightly the third chunk in the recreation of Bowie was a wonderful little treasure, just the thing to switch off the alienation and cool electronica to exchange it for rich textures and patterns, global world view and heavy rock guitar ... it was a blissful triumph, ...  Read the complete review

Made after the twin glories of Low and Heroes, Lodger has a tendency to get lost in Bowie?s back catalogue. I?ll admit I bought it at the time because it was cheap and I was a little broke, instead of going the whole hog and buying Heroes. I got home, expecting great things (I?d only recently bought Outside and so was on a real high; if it was Bowie it was gonna be great), got home and: ?In the event that this fantastic voyage, should lead to erosion and the never get home?? I was feeling less than inspired. I let it play, switched it off and probably put Outside on, or some other CD I really wanted to listen to. A few months later I bought Low, Heroes, ...  Read the complete review

1979 was a rather predictable year for music; the sixties were far out of people’s memories, Glam Rock became laughable, and Punk had become far so commercial that the only punk value that still remained was not to wash your hair (as long as your manager told you to do so), and the New Romantics were all meeting at student wine parties in Winchester. Bowie had cone through his many different genre, some of which had been fantastically successful (such as Ziggy Stardust) and the not so successful (such as Young Americans, enough said!), but after Bowie’s retreat to Germany, he hit his pinnacle of this era with Lodger from 1979. This LP looks ...  Read the complete review

Ah Mr. Eno I presume. He really does bring some interesting things out of our David. Leaving behind hippy, glam rock, apocalyptic, alien, thin white duke, industrial music we slip neatly into this. I have no idea how to define this, except to say it is jolly good. Again we have the experimental sounds, instruments and lyrics which all fit together into one marvellous package. The first track sets the scene nicely, with David singing of “learning to live with somebody’s depression” with proud hooky vocals over an interesting arrangement. The second track changes completely from the first. With all manner of interesting noises and frenzied guitar ...  Read the complete review

The third and final instalment to the so called Berlin Trilogy is musically very mixed bag, with only a handful of tracks at the back end of the album saving it - quite hard to imagine that some of the rubbish earlier on has anything to do with Mr Bowie! Take for example African Night Flights which is lyrically oddball and just pain awful. Luckily the album somewhat improves thanks to the likes of the entertaining DJ and the loudest piece from the album, Look Back in Anger which was played live a fair bit. As well as these two, Boys Keep Swinging saw a well received and deserved performance on Saturday Night Live, and not forgetting Repetition ...  Read the complete review