Word: lodger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...number of songs on Lodger take the album title's cue and present tales of travel. "Move On" is Bowie's paean to the vagrant life, his infinitely more urbane version of the Who's "Going Mobile." He uses his dramatic, declamatory singing style to good effect here as in "Heroes," reminding us that he's got one of the great pop voices of our day. "Red Sails" has obscure lyrics--witness...
...these are probably not the songs you'll hear first; radio stations have chosen "D.J." and "Boys Keep Swinging" for airplay. "D.J." is the most commercial and least interesting song on Lodger--Bowie's vocal acrobatics are impressive, but the music is in the same style as, and not much of an advance on, that of Young Americans. "Boys Keep Swinging" sets the throbbing electronic pulse of "Heroes" to lyrics that sound like Bowie's answer to the Village People. He's always skirted the epicene, of course, and this is just a bit of harmless camp, but it seems...
Only Eno has used the capabilities of the synthesizer to create entirely new sounds, noises which make it a unique instrument, not an imitator. Bowie succeeds on Lodger by harnessing Eno's abstruse, intellectual sounds and molding them into songs with human interest for a mass audience. That's not decadent; it's visionary...