DAVID
BOWIE CUT'S THE CRAP
DAVID
BOWlE/TIN MACHINE EMI USA MTS 1044 LP/Cass/CD.
What a racket. Bowie's new record, the first with his so-called Tin Machine
band, is the loudest, hardest, heaviest effort of his whole career, and
offers the listener an experience that's not unlike allowing your head to
be used as a punchbag. Stranger still, you'll come to find you kind of like
it.
Tin
Machine, the album, is obviously a result of some re-thinking
on Bowie's part. It veers dramatically off the circular, self-absorbed,
pedestrian path he's trudged across the past two or three LPs, and revives
his energy levels and all-round excitement quota by recalling some of the
bolder moments of his musical history - Width Of A Circle, The
Jean Genie, the most jagged edges of Ziggy
Stardust - and cops a feel off hard rock inspirations such as
Jimi Hendrix and, perhaps, prime time Sex Pistols. Nor is it coincidental
that his choice of rhythm section (Tony Sales on
bass, brother Hunt Sales on drums) is the same one he
deployed on Iggy Pop's 1977 storm back to form Lust
For Life.
With
its line-up completed by guitarist Reeves Gabrels, Tin
Machine sets about its task with quite savage gusto. There are
monstrous, marauding riffs, browling beats, mucky and drunken mixes, every
song apparently lurching headfirst into the next. The record has a unity -
or, viewed another way, a lack of variety - entirely unlike any previous
Bowie album, and strikes you first as a purgative exercise in crap-cutting.
Several listens in, though, individual tunes begin to make themselves
heard, and in the end their emotional simplicity establishes Tin
Machine as a more accessible sort of record than we're used to
from the mon who once made artifice the crux of his manifesto.
Crack
City, for instance (its riff lifted bodily from Hendrix's
version of Wild Thing) surveys the same apocalyptic vistas of urban
disintegration that he used to prance among with goblin glee; this time
oround, though, he depicts it with unequivocal disgust. Heaven's
In Here, Amazing and Prisoner
Of Love, meanwhile, are openly and romantically positive. If
there's one uncertain note, it's struck by Bowie's reading of Working
Class Hero: Lennon's original was cynical and self-pitying
("A working class hero is something to be"), but gained a sort of
poignancy from its bleakly disillusioned view of how empty a life can be
after dreams have all come true: here, however, the treatment is just too
rollicking, too boisterous, to carry much of the irony.
Reprised
elsewhere, and more successfully, are Bowie's Laughing Gnome-vintage London
accent (on I Can't Read) and toy soldier marching
beat (on Bus Stop), and his old facility for blanked-out numbness
(I Can't Read, again, and Video Crime), where the character's
detachment evokes the value of passion by virtue of its chilly absence.
Overall the man himself sounds more at one with his
music than at any time since the days when the back pages of music papers
carried ads for six-pleat "Bowie pants" ond matelot caps.
Happily, those items have been consigned to history. Better still, his
talent has not.
Paul Du Nayer
Q
Magazine, June 1989