-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Ambient * Ethereal *
Artist..: David Bowie
Album...: Station To Station
GENRE....: Rock
STYLE....: Pop Rock, Experimental, Art Rock, Dance-Rock
LABEL....: EMI SCENE.....: 2015-01-05
BITRATE..: 868 kbps avg STORE.....: 1991-00-00
ENCODER..: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V TRACKS....: 8
SIZE.....: 323.2MB SOURCE....: CD
URL..: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_to_Station
- TRACKLIST
1 Station To Station 10:13
2 Golden Years 4:02
3 Word On A Wing 6:05
4 TVC 15 5:33
5 Stay 6:15
6 Wild Is The Wind 6:04
7 Word On A Wing (Recorded Live At 6:14
Nassau Coliseum, Long Island 1976)
(Bonus Track)
8 Stay (Recorded Live At Nassau 7:33
Coliseum, Long Island 1976) (Bonus
Track)
Total Playtime: 51:59
http://www.discogs.com/David-Bowie-Station-To-Station/release/6152292
1991 reissue of 1976 original - Bonus tracks 7 and 8 are live versions
from the Station To Station tour, recorded 3/23/1976 at Nassau Coliseum, Long Island.
Remastered By [Digital Mastering] û Dr. Toby Mountain
Remastered By [Digital Mastering Assistance] û Jonathan Wyner
Recorded At û Cherokee Studios
Recorded At û Nassau Coliseum
Digital mastering at Northeastern Digital Recording.
*
In just six (long) tracks, Station to Station manages to incorporate almost
everything fantastic about pop music: it's dramatic, stylish, emotional and
danceable. It's not the most celebrated Bowie album û that would be The Rise
and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or Low û but it's been
my favourite right from the moment I heard it, aged 16. The sleeve alone has
a huge sense of occasion, with bold red typography that omits the spaces
between the words, and a glorious picture of a drip-thin Bowie emerging from
a spacecraft, a still from his film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Then there's the mythology. Being a teenager, I was particularly susceptible
to the stories about this record û that it was made in a cocaine blizzard in
LA that involved witchcraft, the collecting of Nazi memorabilia and an
exorcism that left a silhouette of Satan stained on the bottom of a swimming
pool. Yet despite the fact that Bowie was at his maddest (he told NME that
Britain needed a fascist leader a few weeks after the album's release in
1976), and so out of it that he can't even remember recording the thing,
Station to Station is almost frighteningly accomplished, with a glittering,
malevolent glamour I've heard on no other record.
Has there ever been a more epic album opener than the title track? The first
minute is just a sound effect - a train travelling counter-intuitively from
the right speaker to the left. There are screams of feedback, and then the
band kick in with a kind of art-rock death march before Bowie finally
announces his presence, operatically declaiming one of the great first lines:
"The return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers' eyes."
The Thin White Duke was Bowie's final persona, a character who embodied the
allure of evil, immaculately dressed in waistcoat and Oxford bags, crooning
rather than rocking out, determinedly European. He's never looked or sounded
better.
As the song reaches the five-minute mark, speeds up and suddenly turns into a
full-on disco number, the Duke shows his decadence in another line that
impressed the 16-year-old me no end: "It's not the side-effects of the
cocaine û I'm thinking that it must be love". Narcotically fuelled, dropping
oblique references to Crowley and strange religions, Bowie blasts away his
immediate Philly soul past and speeds into a more experimental future over 10
totally exhilarating minutes. The Berlin trilogy of albums would come next:
as Bowie announces, "the European cannon is here".
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That such a monumental opener doesn't overshadow the rest of the album shows
how much Bowie was on fire. Golden Years û a big hit in both the UK and US û
refines the "plastic soul" of previous album Young Americans into something
suave and addictive. Stay is savage funk deconstructed by brilliant, if
audibly wired, musicians. I used to feel that TVC15 was rather pedestrian
compared to the rest of the album, but its second half is just inspired,
jet-propelled by hysterical backing vocals, what sounds like a crazed concert
pianist, and feedback that's almost musique concrete. It becomes apparent
over the course of Station to Station that Bowie had found a band that could
do almost anything, from Broadway-style showstoppers to krautrock û which is
no doubt why he stuck with them (and vice versa) through the rest of the
decade, Low, Heroes and all.
The two other tracks are ballads that get to the heart of Station to
Station's û and Bowie's û ultimate appeal. Word on a Wing has a lyric whose
meaning still remains tantalisingly out of reach: is it about a quest for
meaning in life? For God? Is it sincere, or some kind of demonic piss-take?
Then there's Wild Is the Wind, a cover of a song made famous by Nina Simone,
on which Bowie gives a Sinatra-esque vocal performance so earth-shaking that
it would have most other singers waving the white flag.
It's the tension between the artifice and the emotion, the sheer enigmatic
complexity of what's being expressed, and the uncanny feeling that the band
are creating something that's not entirely down to their own consciousness
that has kept me listening to Station to Station for more than 20 years. The
cocaine had one welcome side-effect: the fact that Bowie doesn't remember
making it means it will never be demystified, and the Duke's corrupt glamour
will therefore never fade.
-=- SHGZ -=-
P.S.
** Thanks ***
*** BCC FNT IPC SSR ***
*** For Knowing Where The Music Is At ***
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