At first it may seem strange: How do 13 CDs or 18 LPs want to be filled with material from a 14-year period in which David Bowie was swallowed for almost ten years as if from the ground? In fact, studio albums make up less than a third of the content. But they have it all: With the shimmering “Sunday” and the creaked Pixies cover “Cactus”, in 2002 he drove out the fears on heats that he would make it comfortable in a saturated late work since the boring predecessor Hours. In places (“Slow Burn”, whose line “At the Center of It All”, a few discs continues to record a few discs on the huge opus “Blackstar”) with the atmospheric masterpieces of Berlin trilogy.
Recommendations of the editorial team
The pop-equivalent that was only recovered a little more than a year later is: Instead of the statesmen’s gray of HEATHEN, bright colors now dominate and the artist himself as an anime comic figure on the cover. “New Killer Star” was the reasonably successful attempt to land another guitar -based radiohite. On the B side he covered “Love Missile F1-11”, the lucky stroke of the talentless 80s hype Sigue Sigue Sputnik produced by Giorgio Moroder. Experted by the successor single “Never Get Old”, he was in a good mood to visit his stored art figures a visit to mineral water advertising. Once again he wanted to be seen as a radiant pop star for the masses.
As the signs of time studying, he published a mash-up from the piece with his glam anthem “Rebel Rebel” as “Rebel Never Gets Old” in 2004 before retiring for almost a decade. This was followed by the live albums Live Santa Monica ’72, which has already been made the first entry of this box set, Five Years, Beilag, VH 1 storytellers, which probably did not make it into the current selection for license reasons, but a reality tour, in whose tracklist now also the pieces “case DOG BAMBSE the original in the original CD release 2010 Moon “,” Breaking Glass “and” China Girl “.
Genius, never go!
Three years later the comeback of the decade in the form of Bowies 25th studio album The Next Day, whose sheer existence towered over the content. The plate looks overloaded and too often disoriented. 14 songs after such a long break are theoretically not too much, but practically in this case. There were also four other numbers on Deluxe Editions, as well as six additional on the “The Next Day Extra” EP. Nothing pointed out the next big act: Blackstar, dramatically published on Bowies 69th birthday and two days before his death. An almost mythical farewell work, a kidnapping into a dark jazz hell, a art rock oratorio between Roxy Night and contemporary sax jazz. In the almost ten -minute title track, Bowie devasts death and transcendence to a highly demanding aesthetics that commutes between peace and calculated disruption. As always in this series, the title of the final song is perfectly chosen as the name of the box set.
I can’t tell you everything! The most exciting is the previously unpublished recording of the concert on July 18, 2002, Montreux Jazz Festival. Among the 31 songs is almost the whole album low. Bowie, on the other hand, ended his unprecedented career on a high. Genius, never go!
This review first appeared in the MusikExpress 10/2025.