The Next Day (2013)

Goddamn, it’s good to have him back. After ten hollow years of silence, amid rumors of fading health and never-ending retirement, we get a new album out of the blue, announced on David’s 66th birthday. And it’s good! Just like Reality, and Heathen before it, it’s easily his … wait for it … BEST ALBUM SINCE ______. Though technically that just means he keeps getting better. Listening to these things in sequence (the way you have to when you write monstrously big, horrifying lists like these), it’s striking just how similar this sounds to Reality. The press has been making noise about the return of Tony Visconti as if he actually went somewhere, when in fact he produced both Heathen and Reality. The bulk of the Reality lineup also appears here, so not much has changed — except the man himself. Ten years. The world could have ended twice in that time. The result of all that time away is a certain hyperawareness of self, as if he’s thought long and hard on his own career and what he still has to offer — from the audacity of defacing one of his own album covers (and a classic at that) to the deliberate attempts to recall earlier incarnations, you get the sense Bowie knows what his audience wants after all these years. Spectacularly, magically, who-the-fuck-knows-how: it works. There’s enough familiarity in the assemblage of classic Bowie components — saxophone, fucked guitars, vocals layered just so — to ease you into a comfortable listening space where the hooks can work their magic. For the first time in ages focus outweighs experimentation, without doing away with inventiveness completely. For every weird thing tried we get a sturdy Motown bass line, or a playful ’50s vocal affectation. And we get riffs! “(You Will) Set the World on Fire” reminds us just how long it’s been since we’ve heard Bowie rock properly, as in the old days when classic rock was just rock — and he does it here. Visconti has been quoted saying a total of 29 tracks were recorded during The Next Day sessions, alluding to the possibility of a quick follow-up later this year. Keep those fingers crossed.