Some of you might be wondering why I’m doing a review of the new David Bowie album when there are no signs of any Bowie reviews on this website. Well a few reasons – like because it’s my column and I can do what I want! – but this is mainly because Bowie and this Record Club go hand in hand. It started in the annals of the Dissolve comment sections as only Bowie Corner, where we would happily assist Elizabeth Lerner’s music project by listening to one Bowie album a day. I would occasionally give two sentence reviews about tubas and forget to listen to the project on numerous instances. It was a simpler time, and around 11 months, some managerial shuffles and the unfortunate close of the still loved website, here we are. Maybe at some point, with a wider audience, I would happily do it all again (at the very least I want to publish the reserved and still fantastic reviews from Dan Abnormal), but until then, let’s continue what we started, with what will be some rough first impressions of an album that has not even been released for a full twenty four hours…

Bowie’s great post-hiatus album The Next Day, from the cover to the music videos, was an album that intentional looked backwards at the bulk of his career with artistic contemplation. Blackstar – or ★ as I’ll like to type – feels like the maverick is again looking forwards, but as with so much of his 21st century work has packed a lot of baggage with him. Having the album be named after such an enigmatic symbol shows since of that distance we’ve come to expect from Bowie’s dark, cut-up world. But on another level, like the alternate personalities that have populated so much of David Jones’ record, the mask is an extension of the self. On this record, Bowie is the ★. The title song, and the cover in which his name is spelt with star parts, say that as clearly as is possible for him.

The obsessions with the occult, as seen by both music videos, harken back to Bowie favourite Station to Station, and on some level ★ does for jazz what Station to Station did for krautrock. This is an ultimately sad and spooky work, one that croons over beats evocative guitars, dark jazz and synths surrounded with as much space as Thomas Jerome Newton. Or is it Lazarus now? Bowie sure likes to make things difficult for the more literal minded. As he does with the language of the album, where various mythologies, religious texts, Jacobean Revenge tragedies, Nadsat and the unfiltered language of modern speak go hand and hand, sitting right next to each other in Bowie’s Underworld.

So much of the album is concerned with the afterlife. It’s an album that begins with an execution and gets less cheery from there. The ghosts of loved ones, the ghosts of war, even the ghosts of Bowie’s past personas can all be found. And for this funeral procession called on partner past and new to accompany him. With the help of long time producer Tony Visconti, and a band that ranges from the amazing saxophone work by Donny McCaslin to some electronic percussion assistance by James Murphy, tracks that once seemed to be from separate projects are all conjoined into something free flowing, ethereal and, well, jazzy.

Jazz is not something new to Bowie, who would use elements in some his classic records, and whose first learned instrument was the saxophone. If the mix of electronic and jazz record has similarities with any work in his catalogue – which it doesn’t really, as Bowie really feels back in iconoclast mode here – it would be the similar experiments made with his single best work of the nineties Outside. But that record could occasionally suffer from a lack of focus (and also the illusion of such with the sheer amount of skits), but despite how long the seven songs are on this record, and the free flowing nature of the jazz base, the vast majority feel like fully fleshed songs instead of ideas. Here, ★, on  vision of those records, followed with the withered nihilism of his best 21st work like Heathen, fully realised.

★ begins with the title track, which next to Station to Station’s title track is the second longest song that Bowie has every made, and as such feels like its suspended in time and space. This is especially true for the opening, built on the quiet guitars and woodwind, alongside the punch synthesisers and percussion, all fused together with Bowie’s low, ethereal vocals. Bowie’s voice throughout this record has some comparison with contemporary retainer of fucks Scott Walker, and here he move from those dark ghostly voices associated with Walker’s late period work, before transitioning into more classic Bowie. That traditional is played almost like a torment, with six minutes in the song moving into a funky, guitar led swagger that is followed soon by clarinets at gregorian chants. In the mix of this deathly cacophony, with one section transitioning swiftly into the next, we begin with description of a ritualistic execution, and between that and images of spirits is Bowie’s narrator describing himself as the titular Blackstar. But what is? Well we don’t know for sure, other than chants telling us what he unequivocally is not. Visconti has said that the song is on  about ISIS, and while I’m not willing to let colour too much of what is an incredibly vague and mysterious song, there are indeed images of the corruption of faith throughout this track and others. But here it takes many forms: religion, the occult, fame, even science.

As though the record itself takes a gasp of air after such a towering track, Bowie takes a breath before moving on to “T’is a Pity She Was a Whore”, named after the charming 16th century tale of a charming man who begins an incestous relationship with his sister before ending with him killing her and ripping her heart out for the world to see. Oh, spoilers I guess. The drums of this track  – refined from the loft “demo” version of the original single – bring to mind the breakbeat sounds of the Prodigy and Apex Twin, and over that McCaslin and Bowie do some wild screeching from each of their respective instruments. Given the androgynous reputation of classic Bowie, the “Man, she punched me like a dude” opener comes with thought of crossing genders (something touched on again in the album) and of separating and shaming women. After that image moves on to images of World War 1, and one has to wonder what these two sections have to do with each other. Maybe the war is a women, and with the “kept my cock line” has something to do the demasculination of the men of war. Maybe the fact that the original single cover was Bowie’s reflection in a mirror tells us something. Maybe it doesn’t and it isn’t any of those things. Either way both versions of the song sound as raw and hard hitting as combat.

After war comes the dead, and with “Lazurus” comes resurrection. Also the name of Bowie’s current Off-Broadway musical, which was sung by Bowie’s old character from The Man Who Fell to Earth, the narrator is in kind of space above us, “so high it makes [their] brain whirl”. Or maybe they are not, instead being in New York and the Lazarus metaphor reflecting a insular, emotion kind of death (of a person looking for revenge? After all, “I was looking for your ass” does not sound very flattering). Either way there is a noir like feel to this location, with dark rhythms of echoing bass and guitars that begin first as sirens, and then like the rush of a busy street. On the album version this build up to glorious breakdown of instruments, the more natural percussion taking over, both bass and electric guitar moving in waves with tinkering pianos, and the ecstatic chaos of McCaslin’s sax solo consuming basically everything else.

The last of the pre album singles, “Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)” is the one that has the most drastic transfer to the ★ version. What was previously classical orchestras has been replaced with the most rock sounding instrumentation on the entire album. After the introduction there is barely a woodwind instrument to be found, instead the cool guitar licks and the complex percussion bringing to mind an electronic version of those old funk and krautrock influences (though on occasion I do wish the guitars on this album had a less thin sounding distortion). The lyrics reference a Sue, but there are no gender definitions to describe this character, and if Johnny Cash taught me anything it is that boys can also be named Sue. Either way, there are images of hospitals, death and abandonment abandonment a , upon which Bowie responds for some of the craziest wails of his entire career (and actually giving the aforementioned Scott Walker some operatic competition).

If any song on the album sounds like moods and ideas more than a completely fleshed out song, it would probably be “Girl Loves Me”. But what wonderful moods and ideas, with a lurking, occasionally overblown baseline constantly grooving out to a track ominous strings accompanied with modern hip-hop style, high hat heavy percussion. Apparently Bowie was listening to the similarly jazz influenced To Pimp a Butterfly, which although Visconti says didn’t influence the record too much aesthetically does show itself in strange places (beyond the lack of concession to mainstream tastes), like in the similar manipulation of howling voices. And in those screeching howls, Bowie chronicles a dark tale of a Cheena and Malchick, a girl and boy in the language of Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange. I won’t bother to do a complete translation, mainly because I don’t think Bowie would want me to, but with the screeches and cursing of lost time and the other relationships on this record, I doubt its a positive one.

With the predominate, ethereal piano lead, “Dollar Days” is the track on ★ that sounds like some of the greatest songs from Outside. It’s beautiful melody is subset by echoing guitars and the opening smooth jazz styling of the saxophone, and with the later spatting of acoustic guitar conjures images of pastures green that are soon taken oven by Oligarchs. On the current affairs route, If “Blackstar” is abstractly about ISIS, does the imagery of constantly trying to get to English fields away from a constant spectre of death has images of the current migrant crisis? Even if its nothing that specific, like the title track it moves to other images of things that entrap us, like capitalist struggle  for money and “magazine” culture (he calls us bitches!). This makes the final burst instrumentation, from the guitar solo to the howling saxophone, that moves segues perfectly into the final track feel like some kind of liberation.

Initially, the closing track of “I Can’t Give Everything Away” seems to follow this escapist suit. The instrumentation is more joyous than the rest of the album, with drum loops looked over by LCD Soundsystem’s own James Murphy, bright rock organs and even what sounds like harmonica highlighting a sunnier – and from the title, more charitable – disposition that McCaslin’s final saxophone solo helps to complement. That is of course until one looks further at the lyrics, upon which we know something is very wrong: “The pulse returns for prodigal sons/With blackout’s hearts with flowered news/With skull designs upon my shoes”. Those images of death and a lack of heir bring an even further finality to the events of the album, but even as they are designed to do so they only bring more questions:

Seeing more and feeling less
Saying no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That’s the message that I sent

But what he saying no to? What precisely has he seen and not felt? Who is he speaking too? Is it us? Well, it wouldn’t be Bowie if he could make us figure out these things so quickly. Or at all.

It is only been a day, and it would therefore be foolish of me to place this album in any kind of definite rankings, but at this moment now I would be willing to call this Bowie’s best album of this century. There is so much here still to go through, thus why I have labelled this record as a first impression, and I’m looking forward to exploring that that Bowie has built around this star. Among the many images and ideas that will reveal themselves as the weeks go by, it is great to here a Bowie album that, even after some great records, feels like he is in the forefront of something. What that thing is I don’t know. But I hope, after five decades of music, that I will still be following him through more,.

What do you think, though?