David Bowie – Low (1977)
[Album 184/1001]
Some may call me a hypocrite. I prefer, ‘series of fascinating contradictions.’
Falsetto? Love the Beach Boys Pet Sounds Era, don’t get the appeal of the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever Era.
Nü-metal? Deftones, yes please. Limp Bizkit, pass.
70s experimental? I’m hoping to one day fully appreciate Brian Eno. I’m rarely able to find anything negative to say about the music of Mr. David Bowie.
I don’t pretend to understand how such similarly classified music leads to such polarizing reactions on my part.
I do know this about Low:
– Most listeners, Bowie fans or not, should find something to like on side one.
– If searching for radio-friendly singles, going through side two will be a fruitless search! More like a movie score, it certainly works, but sounds nothing like Space Oddity. Many will describe its atmospheric sound as merely odd and spacey.
Which is the beauty of Bowie: no two records sound alike, here not even two sides within the one album.
For that reason, I could not have less of a problem with so many of his records being declared as ‘must hear(s) before you die.’
the reason side two sounds like a movie score is that it WAS. 🙂 side two is Bowie’s attempt at the score for The Man Who Fell to Earth, but it was rejected by the director.
i get what your saying about “similarly classified music lead[ing] to such polarizing reactions.” i love Low, but i have a distaste for Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor. that has the exact same paradigm of keeping the loud and the quiet completely separate from each other.
I was not aware of that, I’m glad he didn’t throw it out after it was rejected!