Never Let Me Down (1987)

Bowie’s mid-’80s output is rough going. This album, and the nightmare that was Tonight, are like binary stars of garish awfulness, one orbiting the other in a galaxy of aural diarrhea. But somehow Never Let Me Down has gained the worse reputation of the two, which, to these ears, seems unfair. Sure, it’s like comparing the relative worth of a dirty diaper and a dingleberry, but let’s go there. I posit that while Tonight is generally worthless, that assessment isn’t 100% fair to Never Let Me Down (maybe 96%). Still grossly overproduced, you can hear Bowie fighting to reclaim his voice under the wall of gloss. He assembled an actual band in order to get back to playing rock and roll the right way, and … it’s occasionally apparent. There’s no way around it: This is still bad Bowie. But unlike the bulk of Tonight (“Loving The Alien” gets a half-hearted pass), this album retains the thinnest filament of Bowie’s creative spark — experiments with vocal delivery yield a few interesting results, and the songs feel more like a stab at actual art than anything Bowie had done since Scary Monsters. “Time Will Crawl” is bearable. If someone threw that on at a party, your head might subconsciously bob a few times before you caught yourself. “Beat Of Your Drum” has something going for it — what, exactly, is hard to say, but it’s not complete garbage. Sadly, there’s not much else to recommend. Mickey Rourke pops in to rap over the bridge of “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love),” which is funny, but still pretty awful. You can do better, Bowie.