More awful music from our man Bowie, but at least this time it’s fast and stupid instead of slow and insipid.
Nope, this one is just a run-of-the-mill horrendous pile of synthesized 80's swill ... everything is big and loud, and fake and layered, and shamelessly attempting to keep up with 'the times', which in 1987 meant big, ugly, echoey, fake music with no melody or personality.
Never Let Me Down is better than
Tonight, but that’s not saying much. I don’t think a single instrument sounds good - the drums are huge and reverbed to hell, the keyboards all fall into the 'heavenly' background type, else the instantly dateable fake 80's type. The guitars are processed, and sound like typical fake 80's plastic bullshit. And the horns are overloud and overbusy, and play not a single note that does anything positive for a single song, plus they’re so tinny I can barely tell them from Wakeman-style keyboards.
Melodies are nonexistent, so that's made up for by the endless piling on of shitty instruments that sound fake. So, if the key word for
Tonight was 'insipid', then the key word for
Never Let Me Down is 'fake'. I’ve heard worse yes, but this is the most stereotypically fake 80's album in Bowie's catalog, so I feel comfortable labeling it as such. Plus the damn thing is so faceless it would probably benefit from my giving it a label, so this is the 'fake eighties' album, and
Tonight was the 'insipid eighties' album.
I’m not gonna spend much time talking about individual songs this time, because they all sound exactly the same, but I will take time to point out a couple that are especially odious ...
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“Zeroes” is ridiculous, because it starts out with what sounds like a fake crowd noise, until that is you listen closely and realize it’s just a bunch of squealy synthesizer sounds. Yep, this album is so fake even the crowd noise is synthesized! Then when the song starts breaking out tabla drums and a sitar in the background of its totally generic and awful 80's pop swill, I simply have to laugh ... who do you think you are Bowie, George Harrison? Come on.
Following “Zeroes” is “Glass Spider”, which is so ridiculous I don’t think I can adequately describe it. I guess it gets points for being the only song on the album that’s not horrifically fake 80's swill, but five kajillion negative points for the comical 'artistic' narration about a glass-like spider that used to live in China (Oh, the Glass Spider had blue eyes almost like a human's. They shed tears at the wintered turn of the centuries). Not to mention the main part of the song, which may be the most fake-synthesized few minutes on the whole record (But it’s 'moody', so it’s not so bad, right? Nope! It sucks even more!).
The only song here I like is the relatively gentle title track, which combines some surprisingly tasteful echoed guitar, subtle keyboards, a nice bit of harmonica, along with a half-decent melody, into something that actually has some redeeming value, unlike the rest of this slop. And the chorus of “Beat of Your Drum” is moderately hooky too, but the rest of the song is as awful as everything else.
I don’t know what else to say. This album is just really really bad.
So that’s two shitpiles in a row for Bowie. Not good! One look at some footage from the Glass Spider Tour that supported the album shows just how far into the schlocky 80's morass Bowie had fallen by this point. See, this is what happens when you follow trends so shamelessly ... when the trends blow, so do you.
Rated: 






by Reviewer:
BRAD