GuD

Yep. So I'm makin a journal. A place to share my musical experiences with y'all because sometimes it's okay to take a break from FIDLARing and just talk. On the reals. So here goes, I'll start off with a review of "Heroes" by David Bowie as per the theme thing whatever it is that we're doing.

HEROES by DAVID BOWIE:

Bowie is one of the first artists I ever really got into. He was also one of the first artists I ever owned anything by. "Heroes" was my favorite song on the double-disc, 40-something song compilation. It's a great love song with easily Bowie's most impassioned vocals ever recorded. I always imagined it as the story of a lovers' one night stand. They were in some way doomed, or felt doomed, by the world around them. But perhaps under different circumstances they might have lived the rest of their lives together. Or perhaps their love has a fighting chance, should they succeed at defeating the chaos around them.

The rest of the album is definitely strange. You can hear Bowie's highly varied influences all over the place- his early fascinations with outer space in form of weird-as-hell reverberant synthesizers, gospel and r&b with those horns here and there, cabaret, and a bit of funky boogie-down rock and roll. But completely tweaked out boogie-down rock and roll. His signature yelping vocal style, slightly distorted, cut in here and there but if you really listen to it, the focus of this album is mostly instrumental. Robert Fripp plays guitar on most of the album and it's avant garde tones really work well with the synthesizers and just weird, smart, eclectic, fun vibes the album has.

"Sense of Doubt" breaks the album apart, it's kind of an odd break mid-way through but it's alternations between brooding lower register pianos and slightly more uplifting synthesizers would feel right at place in some 80s experimental scifi flick. It's a sort of segue from the first half of the album's more oddball rockin' edge to the second half's more tranquil, psychedelic, spacey side which experiments with world music fused with ethereal synthesizers. This part of the album starts of interesting for me but after a while I just start to tune it out. "The Secrets of Arabia" brings things back into more familiar territory. A very dancey tune that just kinda fades out abruptly. It's a good song, I just think it's a little out of place and is a sloppy ending to an otherwise intriguing album.

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc