Word: lodger
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...Lodger is striking not just because Bowie assumes many characters on it, but 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...
...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...