Word: eno
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DAVID BOWIE returns triumphantly to earth with his latest record. He had been off exploring the possibilities of avant-garde electronic rock, an amazing journey guided by British synthesizer genius Brian Eno, for two albums. Those albums, Low and Heroes, were fascinating but uneven. Bowie seemed to be exposing an extravagant side of his musical language, one that wallowed in nine-minute moans and tones. He also turned out some excellent songs, especially the first side of Low and the title track of Heroes...
...because he draws on the different musical styles of his past to find the right sound for each. The album has straight rock and roll, some R&B-influenced pop, some ballads and anthems, and a lot of the electronically treated avant-garde rock a la Low. Eno's role in the preparation of Lodgeris considerably narrower than on the previous albums; Bowie apparently called the shots here, with Eno simply finding the perfect sound to match Bowie's ideas...
What Bowie has learned from his extended association with Eno is how to manipulate the texture of each song. In the first song on Lodger, a saccharine ballad decrying the possibility of nuclear war called "Fantastic Voyage," the sound is gloppy and sweet--Eno is responsible for providing "ambient drone," the record jacket tells us. For the next track, a weird patter-song called "African Night Flight," his contribution is "prepared cricket menace." Elsewhere on the album he offers work on the Eroica horn or the horse trumpet...
Whatever combination of electronics. tape, and his own inspiration Eno uses. the sounds he concocts never stray from the musical demands of Bowie's songs, and the sheer multitude and variety of these sounds makes Lodger a fascinating album almost as fascinating efforts. Lodger can claim its own identity because of Bowie's flair for personification--he takes each of Eno's abstract noises and weds it to whichever character he's playing at the moment...
...African Night Flight," Lodger's most interesting song, Bowie becomes a British pilot pushing his luck somewhere in Central Africa. Bowie spits out syllables like gunfire, Eno's crickets' chatter, the band thumps out a halting beat, and Eno chants Swahili in the background. If you heard it on your car radio, you'd probably switch the station, and if you heard it on a transistor radio you'd think you were between stations--but on a good stereo, maybe with headphones, you just might be up there over Mombassa, running guns or running out of fuel...