Send "David Bowie " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 When rock stars do too much cocaine, they tend to do ridiculous things, like drive cars into motel swimming pools, or hire hit men to snuff out their bassist, or make Be Here Now. David Bowie, on the other hand, produced Station to Station, an album he allegedly doesn't remember making, but which, ironically, stands as his most immaculately constructed album, and the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention.Arriving in the wake of 1975's glam-rock-shunning, Philly-soul-fetishizing Young Americans, Station to Station offered proof that Bowie's fascination with American funk and disco was no one-off lark. But if Young Americans often felt like a studied genre exercise, Station to Station filtered that rhythmic influence through some of Bowie's other obsessions at the time: the austere Krautrock of Neu! and Kraftwerk, the occult, Nazism, and, yes, a whole lotta blow. And yet, for all the tales of late-night black-majick ceremonies and Hitler-salute scandals that surrounded its release, perhaps the most bizarre thing about Station to Station is that an album of such sinister orgin would turn out to be Bowie's highest charting album ever in the U.S., peaking at No. 3. By the mid-70s, it was customary for pop stars to sing of their disillusionment with fame (see: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Neil Young's On the Beach) but they usually did so in an insular, introspective fashion, after they had gained some distance from the storm. By contrast, Station to Station finds Bowie expressing his weariness while the party was still rages on around him; even in the midst of his "Golden Years", he's yearning to "run for the shadows." In essence, the album is a cry for help from the champagne room: On the hymn-like piano-ballad "Word on a Wing", the career chameleon decries this "age of grand illusion" (tellingly, this LP's Thin White Duke persona would be the last character Bowie introduced), while the title track's momentous prog-disco suite-- with references to Aleister Crowley and Kabbalism-- charts a course from spiritual void toward ecstatic religious reawakening. "It's not the side effects of the cocaine," Bowie declares as the song hits its funky, 4/4 stride, "I'm thinking that it must be love." Rarely have delusions been rendered with such grandeur....full text |
| Stylusmagazine |
| For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it. I was trying to decide what to do for a Classic Music review when I decided I should check to see what Bowie we’ve already covered. I was amazed to see that until Scott McKeating took up the cause with his fine piece on Black Tie White Noise we had not done a classic review of any of Bowie’s work. Personally, I’m a weird, possibly predictable kind of Bowie fan (and I’m of the opinion that we’re all Bowie fans, if we can just find the right album); I’m a Berlin Years guy. Sure, I like most of Bowie’s work, but the ones I own and throw on for pleasure tend to be the four astonishing LPs he made between 1977-9. So, seeing a gap, I immediately went mad with power and called dibs on all four (spread out over four months, naturally). I’m sure at least some of our readers right now are disputing Station To Station’s right to be referred to as of a piece with the other three Berlin albums. It was recorded in Hollywood, for one thing, and rather than being part of Bowie’s attempt to cleanse himself of drugs and madness it represents the very nadir of those destructive tendencies. But it’s for that very reason that I feel I can’t discuss the Berlin albums without reference to Station To Station. It’s the cry of despair that spurred Bowie to clean himself up, and it deserves high praise whether grouped with Low, ”Heroes” and the undervalued Lodger or taken on its own. It’s also fairly famous among Bowie fans, of course, for being the one record in his long, occasionally tortuous discography that Bowie himself does not remember making. Apparently except for a brief memory of instructing guitarist Earl Slick on what kind of guitar sound he wanted for the beginning of the title track, Bowie has as little idea how Station To Station came to be as any of us....full text |
| Onethirtybpm |
| Is Station to Station the best transitional album in rock history? Even though it heralded the introduction of David Bowie’s latest alter ego, the Thin White Duke, it still falls in the grand scheme of the man’s career into the “lost” years between his first classic era (the genre-defining glam rock of Hunky Dory through Diamond Dogs) and his second (the Eno-assisted Berlin trilogy). I hate to call a David Bowie album from 1976 underrated, because there’s no serious rock fan who will disagree with the opinion that his ‘70s output is probably the greatest decade any artist has had post-Beatles. But because it doesn’t fit neatly into one of Bowie’s famous personas, a lot of people don’t realize that Station to Station is the best album he’s ever made, period. As disheveled as his life was during the making of Station to Station (by all accounts, his cocaine intake during this period was somewhere between David Lee Roth circa 1978 and Tony Montana circa 1980), Bowie has never sounded more assured or locked-in. The music is an outgrowth of the so-called “plastic soul” of the previous year’s inconsistent Young Americans, but this time, Bowie wisely dropped the soulman presentation and focused on the songs. And the songs are some of the best of his career. “Word on a Wing” is an all-time great Bowie ballad, up there with “Life on Mars?” and “All the Young Dudes.” The sprawling, 10-minute title track and “TVC 15” hit upon an absolutely devastating fusion of the R&B of Young Americans and the angular art-rock he would explore in greater depth on his next three records. And then there’s the straight-up funk stuff: Bowie’s falsetto shines on “Golden Years” and “Stay,” as does the guitar work of Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar. Discussing the best Bowie album is no small task—there are around 10 for which you could make a pretty convincing case—but to my ears he’s never been better than he was here. As for this particular reissue of the album, Bowie has created an industry around repackaging his classic work that is rivaled only by Elvis Costello and KISS, but the three-disc Special Edition of Station to Station is probably the best of the bunch. The remastered version of the album sounds stellar, and it’s coupled with a blistering New York concert from 1976, often bootlegged but released officially here for the first time. Backed by a killer band, Bowie rips through most of Station to Station and revamped funk-leaning versions of Ziggy Stardust-era standards....full text |
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