David Bowie's Albums From Worst To Best

Low (1977)

Broken shards of songs. Wandering alien worlds of sound and noise. Boiled down to its component parts, Low doesn’t sound like much. But listening to the record — then as now — you’re transported someplace new, someplace bold and strange, someplace hard to leave. Granted, our minds are conditioned to such strangeness these days, largely because of the lasting influence this record has had on just about everyone who’s made interesting music in the last 35 years. Emphasizing texture and mood over hooks or structure (see the harrowing “Warszawa,” assembled by Brian Eno with vocal contributions from Bowie), Low shifted the collective expectations of serious music listeners in ways that few other works of outré art ever could. To put it another way, hardly anyone was looking to Metal Machine Music for inspiration. This was to be the first piece of the Berlin trilogy, the sequence of albums written while Bowie and Iggy Pop were trying to kick some bad habits by absconding from the enabling surroundings of Los Angeles to Berlin. In Bowie’s own words: “I moved out of the coke center of the world into the smack center of the world.” The name Low then takes a literal meaning, describing Bowie’s mood during much of the writing process. That melancholic air permeates the music, particularly the second side, which is primarily instrumental. Similar in many ways to the record that would follow, “Heroes”, in that they share the same dual-sided structure and penchant for experimentation, Low remains the darker record, and the moodiness serves it well. Even in light of the records that came after, both from Bowie and from the millions he influenced, there’s nothing else like Low. Sound and vision indeed.