A remarkable recording for many reasons. The debut of Tin Machine predates by nearly half a decade much of the guitar-oriented alternative pop that followed the grunge...
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Heathen marks a new beginning for David Bowie in some ways -- it's his first record since leaving Virgin, his first for Columbia Records, his first for his new label, ISO --...
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Miserable over 9/11 and facing the looming ravages of age that even a superstar must accept, David Bowie bares his heart and soul on Reality. Bowie lives in Manhattan's Soho...
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David Bowie has switched labels so often his catalog is cluttered with hits compilations, all purporting to be definitive. Since he is one of the few major artists with no...
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David Bowie has switched labels so often his catalog is cluttered with hits compilations, all purporting to be definitive. Since he is one of the few major artists with no...
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Instead of being a one-off comeback, 2002's Heathen turned out to be where David Bowie settled into a nice groove for his latter-day career, if 2003's Reality is any...
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Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The...
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Actually, by the time this package hit the streets in 1997, the only "rare" thing in sight were fans who didn't already own the 15 songs within. Nevertheless, Rarest Live...
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Bowie returns to collaborations with Eno--and while this record is an absolute sonicfest, Bowie's Burroughs-inspired cut-up lyrics make much of this attempt at an actual...
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Outside bears the subtitle The Diary of Nathan Adler or The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue. A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle. Alright, so it reeks of pretension....
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It was probably David Bowie's record-company affiliation difficulties that kept the 1993 Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack to a British TV miniseries from being released in the...
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In 1973, at the height of David Bowie's Ziggy-shaped excess, a small, smirking skeleton came creeping out of his closet, paused to adjust its merry pointy hat, then rocketed...
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Early in 1997, David Bowie sold the rights to his RCA catalog to EMI, and the first release to appear under the new agreement was The Best of David Bowie 1969/1974, which...
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David Bowie needn't have recruited Trent Reznor to pilot this one-song remix project. His stamp is all over I'm Afraid of Americans' source album, Earthling. But while...
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Pin Ups fits into David Bowie's output roughly where Moondog Matinee (which, strangely enough, appeared the very same month) did into the Band's output, which is to say that...
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David Bowie had dropped hints during the Diamond Dogs tour that he was moving toward R&B, but the full-blown blue-eyed soul of Young Americans came as a shock. Surrounding...
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David Bowie has switched labels so often his catalog is cluttered with hits compilations, all purporting to be definitive. Since he is one of the few major artists with no...
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Picking up where EMI's first compilation, The Best of David Bowie 1969/1974, left off, The Best of David Bowie 1974/1979 is an excellent 18-track overview of what are...
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Though this borrows a little too much from the popular trip-hop/ ambient/ jungle/ drum 'n' bass/ boogiematic genres (I made up one, true), there's no denying this is one of...
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Jumping on the post-grunge industrial bandwagon with Outside didn't successfully rejuvenate David Bowie's credibility or sales, so he switched his allegiance to techno and...
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Some collectors might complain that the double-disc Bowie at the Beeb, the first official collection of David Bowie's BBC Radio sessions, isn't complete, yet they likely...
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Rebound's David Bowie is essentially a straight-up reissue of the endlessly reissued David Bowie (Love You Till Tuesday) album. There are no bonus tracks, since Mercury had...
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In 1977, London tried to cash in on David Bowie's tremendous popularity with Starting Point, a ten-song LP looking back on his 1966-67 Deram output. The album had its...
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Hunky Dory's predecessor was stunning--but heard by few until it was reissued by RCA following Ziggy Stardust's success. With the debut of guitarist Mick Ronson, the sound...
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Bowie's first album to really get any notice at all in the States--and that largely at college radio--this catches the singer exactly at the moment before his life would...
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Space Oddity 1/1/1969, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Originally released in the U.S. as Man Of Words, Man Of Music, this album often gets overlooked as not-as-good, pre-Ziggy meanderings. Big mistake. This is one of the few...
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Originally released as Man of Words/Man of Music, Space Oddity was David Bowie's first successful reinvention of himself. Abandoning both the mod and Anthony Newley...
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A classic, true, for all it inspired and for most of the music itself. While much of the material is superb--most notably "Five Years," "Moonage Daydream," "Suffragette...
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Wham bam thank you ma'am...uh, sir. Whatever. Bowie's gender-bending space opera was a rallying cry for rock 'n' roll misfits everywhere upon its release amid an epoch of...
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Aladdin Sane 1/1/1973, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Having established himself as a superstar in the making, Bowie didn't disappoint with this follow-up to Ziggy. In some ways a better album--the addition of pianist Mike...
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Though it's filled with non-original material, this collection of Bowie's favorite pop tunes--which really was one of the very first albums of its kind by a rock star of...
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Perhaps the covers album Pin Ups was conceived as a breather, a way for David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars to regroup amid the hysteria of the Ziggy Stardust mania, or...
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Diamond Dogs 1/1/1974, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Though this got slagged when it came out, it's actually a pretty bold concept--and pretty experimental to boot. Bowie allegedly plays most of the instruments here, and his...
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Recorded late in the first half of David Bowie's 1974 American tour, David Live captures Bowie in pure transition, as his own musical direction sought to segue from the...
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This sounds better and better with age--and if Bowie knew he was making "plastic soul," how does he feel now that everyone else's soul has started to sound like his? Great...
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An intense, powerful album, this followed Bowie's so-called "plastic soul" album Young Americans and ironically sounded much more soulful. A superb version of "Wild Is The...
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Adventurous for certain--short song snippets, droney space-rock, collaborations with Brian Eno--this has dated in a very strange way. Because what was heard here was so...
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Following through with the avant-garde inclinations of Station to Station, yet explicitly breaking with David Bowie's past, Low is a dense, challenging album that confirmed...
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There are better songs here than there were on its predecessor Low--most notably the title track and "Joe The Lion"--but this didn't have quite the long-lasting impact many...
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Repeating the formula of Low's half-vocal/half-instrumental structure, Heroes develops and strengthens the sonic innovations David Bowie and Brian Eno explored on their...
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Stage was David Bowie's second live double album, documenting his supporting tour for Heroes. Supported by a band that featured guitarists Adrian Belew and Carlos Alomar,...
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The last of the Bowie-Eno trilogy, this sounds too much like Talking Heads music for comfort. But it's hard to be angry, with such great tunes as "Boys Keep Swinging" and...
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On the surface, Lodger is the most accessible of the three Berlin-era records David Bowie made with Brian Eno, simply because there are no instrumentals and there are a...
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Bowie's last truly superb album, this was a burst of energy very unexpected at the time. Featuring the sequel to "Space Oddity"--"Ashes To Ashes," which was also blessed...
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David Bowie returned to relatively conventional rock & roll with Scary Monsters, an album that effectively acts as an encapsulation of all his '70s experiments. Reworking...
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Let's Dance 1/1/1983, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Context is certainly everything here. When this came out, such a blatantly commercial album--filled with melodic, danceable pop music--seemed, oddly enough, experimental for...
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Maybe the only completely pointless album Bowie ever released, this showed the man's songwriting ability had apparently gone down the potty--witness the cover of the Beach...
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On the basis of Tonight, it appears that David Bowie didn't have a clear idea of how to follow the platinum success of Let's Dance. Instead of breaking away from the...
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Generally regarded as one of Bowie's worst albums, this is in fact one of the coolest (and earliest) examples of psychedelic-retro pop (not rock) of the '80s. Stylistic...
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David Bowie broke away from the mainstream pop of Tonight with 1987's Never Let Me Down, turning out a jumbled mix of loud guitar rockers and art rock experiments like the...
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Sort of a return to form for Bowie, this album was unjustly lost at sea when its original label--Savage Records--went belly-up scant weeks after its release. Too bad,...
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Black Tie White Noise was the beginning of David Bowie's return from the wilderness of post-Let's Dance, the first indication that he was regaining his creative spark. To...
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Taking Changesbowie one step further, Singles: 1969-1993 collects all of David Bowie's biggest hits while picking up such overlooked gems as "Drive-in Saturday" and "Loving...
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Before landing his first commercial success with 1969's "Space Oddity," David Bowie released a number of flop records in a variety of styles. He first emerged in the...
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Sound + Vision is a triple-disc box set designed to introduce Rykodisc's extensive reissue program of David Bowie's RCA albums. As a result, it has a number of...
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It's remake/remodel time for everyone's favorite stardust monster, and, boy, is this a helluva funky slab of good stuff. On the one hand, prompted by the use of the remixed...
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David Bowie was getting himself into a side career of providing peppy ditties for movies for a while there, giving all kinds of films a little coating of coolness. Cool...
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Recalling such classics as Station To Station, Low, and Heroes, David Bowie's latest forgoes the hip electronica of his last recording, Earthling, in favor of styles the...
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Since David Bowie spent the '90s jumping from style to style, it comes as a shock that Hours, his final album of the decade, is a relatively straightforward affair. Not only...
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After who knows how many repackages and reissues of the three singles David Bowie cut for Pye in 1966, under the musically sympathetic auspices of producer Tony Hatch, it's...
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Originally released as Man of Words/Man of Music, Space Oddity was David Bowie's first successful reinvention of himself. Abandoning both the mod and Anthony Newley...
more >
On the surface, Lodger is the most accessible of the three Berlin-era records David Bowie made with Brian Eno, simply because there are no instrumentals and there are a...
more >
David Bowie returned to relatively conventional rock & roll with Scary Monsters, an album that effectively acts as an encapsulation of all his '70s experiments. Reworking...
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Taking the detached plastic soul of Young Americans to an elegant, robotic extreme, Station to Station is a transitional album that creates its own distinctive style....
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Even though it contained no hits, The Man Who Sold the World, for most intents and purposes, is the beginning of David Bowie's classic period. Working with guitarist Mick...
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After the freakish hard rock of The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie returned to singer/songwriter territory on Hunky Dory. Not only did the album boast more folky songs...
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This reissue of David Bowie's first ever LP -- the 1967 set that introduced the world to the likes of "Rubber Band" and "There Is a Happy Land" -- is an intriguing...
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A mid-'70s West German documentary about a 14 year old's descent into drug abuse, prostitution, and general sleaze led to this 1981 soundtrack, comprised entirely of...
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It's beautifully packaged, designed as a hardcover book, filled with full-color photos (many by Mick Rock, whose limited-edition book with Bowie, Moonage Daydream: The Life...
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There's an old joke about the famous rocker who, stumped for a suitable Christmas present for his friends and family, ended up handing them all a signed photo. David Bowie's...
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Ziggy played guitar -- and then he quit. On July 3, 1973, on-stage at London's Hammersmith Odeon, David Bowie took his leave of the last 18 months of stardom and insanity...
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Some collectors might complain that the double-disc Bowie at the Beeb, the first official collection of David Bowie's BBC Radio sessions, isn't complete, yet they likely...
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Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture has always been a bit of a troublesome artifact. As the one official live album and live movie capturing Bowie and the Spiders from Mars,...
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The 30th Anniversary Edition of David Bowie's sci-fi, lounge-jazz, glam rock album Aladdin Sane is a treat for those who are obsessed with packaging and extra tracks. In...
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After summing up his maverick tendencies on Scary Monsters, David Bowie aimed for the mainstream with Let's Dance. Hiring Chic bassist Nile Rodgers as a co-producer, Bowie...
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David Bowie seemed like an artist without direction ever since the success of Let's Dance, switching styles and genres with a speed that made him appear nervous, not...
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Since David Bowie spent the '90s jumping from style to style, it comes as a shock that Hours, his final album of the decade, is a relatively straightforward affair. Not only...
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Capitalizing on the surprise success of Scumfrog's remix of "Loving the Alien," EMI sneaks out this collection of "Rare and Unreleased 12" Mixes." They could have remained...
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Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The...
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