BLACKSTAR
| David Bowie
BLACKSTAR
Blackstar (stylised as ) is the twenty-fifth and final studio album by English musician David Bowie. It was released worldwide through ISO, RCA, Columbia, and Sony on 8 January 2016, coinciding with Bowie's 69th birthday. The album was largely recorded in secret between The Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios in New York City with Bowie's longtime co-producer Tony Visconti and a group of local jazz musicians. Two days after its release, Bowie died of liver cancer; his illness had not been revealed to the public until then. Co-producer Visconti described the album as Bowie's intended swan song and a "parting gift" for his fans before his death. Upon release, the album was met with critical acclaim and commercial success, topping charts in a number of countries in the wake of Bowie's death, and becoming Bowie's only album to top the Billboard 200 in the United States. The album remained at the number-one position in the UK charts for three weeks. It was the 5th best selling album of the entire year, worldwide. It was also the best selling album worldwide for two consecutive weeks, having sold more than 969,000 copies as of 31 January 2016. It has sold more than 1,900,000 copies as of April 2017 and received Gold and Platinum certifications in the U.S and the U.K., respectively. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, the album won awards for Best Alternative Music Album; Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical; Best Recording Package, and the title single won Best Rock Performance, and Best Rock Song. The album was also awarded the British Album of the Year at the 2017 Brit Awards, and Metacritic named it the most critically acclaimed album of the year by music publications. -WIKIPEDIA
Critic Reviews
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NME
Bowie ushers in his 70th year with a restless, intriguing album that sprinkles stardust at every turn.
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Pitchfork
Blackstar has David Bowie embracing his status as a no-fucks icon, clutching onto remnants from the past as exploratory jazz and the echos of various mad men soundtrack his freefall.
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NPR
is feral, instinctive, the most out-there dispatch from the guy who celebrated his 69th birthday last Friday and left this Earth on Sunday as rock's most radical superstar.
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Rollingstone
The arty, unsettling ‘Blackstar’ is Bowie’s best anti-pop masterpiece since the Seventies.
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UCR
Blackstar isn't so much an anti-rock 'n' roll album as it is a continuation on the genre-bending, experimental path Bowie has charted more consistently and more successfully than almost any of his peers.
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CRACK
Blackstar is Bowie reviewing his own existence, auditing his cultural footprint, and falling to his knees in the finality of his own death. It’s a record of maddening scope and invention where every moment feels like the final breath is drawn before closing its eyes forever.
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xs noise
Blackstar is the result of his determination to enjoy the time he had left doing the thing he loved; creating music in complete freedom with no constraints other than the time left on the meter.
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The Telegraph
Blackstar is impressively hard to place in his back catalogue and feels completely self-contained. It has some of the off-kilter character of his late Seventies Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes and Lodger) but little of their electronic flavour.
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billboard
Blackstar is its own strange, perverse thing, the latest move in a boundlessly unpredictable career.
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CoS
A tense and melancholy drama that's as Bowie as they come.
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AV/MUSIC
Blackstar consists of seven long-ish songs, most of them morbid, all of them suggestive of underworlds. These are spiritual, criminal, and psychosexual underworlds of the pulp imagination, seen in cut-up stories about delinquents.
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audiofemme
A final act, Blackstar is not. Rather a fitting ellipsis on his countless cosmic journeys through the perils of reality and once again Bowie has invited us to take his hand and follow behind, trudging gracefully against gravity and the notion that we are more than just messy, breathing constellations of matter.
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ROCKHAQ
Blackstar is not only a good album; it sees David Bowie at a creative parallel to that of his critically lauded Berlin trilogy.
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Chicago Tribune
Haunting 'Black Star' adds to Bowie Legacy.
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DIY
‘Blackstar’ seems to be him giving everything, allowing all of his creative impulses to flourish.
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SLANT
Blackstar is defiantly a thing of its own, allowing Bowie to revisit his career-spanning, paradoxical fears with fascinating new sounds.
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ALL MUSIC
Blackstar is difficult when the main pleasure of the record is how utterly at ease it all feels: Bowie's joy in emphasizing the art in art-pop is palpable and its elegant, unhurried march resonates deeply.
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sputnik music
David Bowie the artist, at his finest, portrays David Bowie the man.
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The Telegraph
Blackstar is impressively hard to place in his back catalogue and feels completely self-contained.
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paste
True to the tone of the record, Bowie is almost a spectre throughout [Blackstar].
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Entertainment
it’s the kind of album that works beautifully as a physical experience.
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The Line of Best Fit
As with David Bowie’s entire career, he’s once again given us enough to keep us wanting more, while reminding us of all the inspired gifts that came before.
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musicOMH
It’s an album that sums up Bowie as an artist--restless, audacious, constantly looking forward to the next new idea. January may only be a week old, but that ‘Best Of 2016’ list already has a slot filled.
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popMATTERS
It’s trippy and majestic head-music spun from moonage daydreams and made for gliding in and out of life.
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Pretty Much Amazing
When packaged together, the album’s 41 minutes of clatter, jazz, and incantation coalesce into something otherworldly and almost marvelous.
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THE SKINNY
Blackstar is an absorbing (if consciously arty and perhaps a shade self-indulgent) listen.
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Record Collector
The Bowie that his fans love most--the unpredictable, courageous and cutting-edge enthusiast-- is properly back, and while this kind of intense listening experience might not trouble the current crop of massive-selling rock stars, he’s somehow a damn sight more vital than the lot of them.
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PUNKNEWS.ORG
Recorded by a New York jazz quartet, the entire record sounds superb and oddly intimate.
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The Quietus
David Bowie hasn't sounded this relevant in an age. [Blackstar] marks the bold and rejuvenated beginnings of a second or maybe third wind.
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dusted
[This] is the first time Bowie’s been interesting since 2002’s overlooked Heathen, and if you prefer his avant-garde side, this is the first sustained material of its kind in far longer; both of these are certainly things to celebrate.
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Tiny Mix Tapes
While Blackstar features a fair amount of indulgence, especially on the aforementioned 10-minute-long title track, it never feels labored, and the music never even once imitates the nightmarish soundscapes of Scott Walker.
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The Observer
urgent, contemporary and elliptical.
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NO ripcord
With Blackstar, Bowie disengages himself once again from popular opinion and scoffs at the idea of taking the righteous path, finding inspiration in what is immoral and contentious. But in doing so he also finds an artful niche that suits his sixty nine years of age.
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Under the Radar
[Blackstar], amidst all its trappings, is a puzzle begging for examination, and a solidly unique work from an artist who is no stranger to breaking boundaries.
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Drowned in Sound
Blackstar sees him and his band nail a haunting mood.
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NOW
Bowie's joy in emphasizing the art in art-pop is palpable and its elegant, unhurried march resonates deeply.
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Boston Globe
The album is dense and intriguing, neither a straightforward rock record nor so wildly experimental as to be inaccessible.
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exclaim!
With Blackstar, Bowie has made a record that fits comfortably within that legacy while reasserting himself as an artist that continuously makes challenging and rewarding music.
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The Guardian
It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music.
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The New York Times
It’s at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans.
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INDEPENDENT
David Bowie releases the most extreme album of his entire career: Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop.
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American Songwriter
Lyrically, Bowie it at his best here when he dives fully into off-kilter impressionism and ponders the uncertain present and apocalyptic future.
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LOUDER
Even more than The Next Day, these seven tracks suggest the sounds inside his head are in sync with his long-time soul brother Scott Walker, though thankfully he remains on warmer terms with old-fashioned melody and emotion.
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Esquire
Bowie does not sound ready to die. He's desperate to keep living.
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The Economist
The singer's final album is jazz, hip-hop, space-age and vintage all at once, a fitting capstone for a glorious career
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Medium
Blackstar is a tightly constructed maze, one that can lead the listener in many directions: from the real to the unreal, from the occult to the philosophical, from morbid humour to painful reality, from life to death.
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Bearded Gentlemen Music
BLACKSTAR IS THE BEST ALBUM OF 2016 HANDS DOWN.
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KEXP
Blackstar is a brilliant and triumphant journey, and reminds us that we only have more time to prove our worth and place in the world.
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Secret Meeting
Blackstar is an absolute triumph in every way. David finally got to make the record he’d coveted for many years, and the results are breathtaking.
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AltVenger
it’s a masterpiece, perhaps even THE masterpiece.
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Northern Transmissions
it’s a triumph.
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The Busted Amp
Blackstar is the brainchild of a carefully orchestrated and (in typical Bowie fashion) flawlessly executed farewell to his fans.
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headstuff
It’s fitting that the album blends so many of his iconic musical styles and genres; cosmic electronic, jazz elements, lyrics both dark and clever, and a kind of forward thinking that only he could convey.
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AU.
Even in the throes of his illness, he has made a record that, like his best, continues the ideas of his other work – the themes of alienness and excess have permeated his catalogue – while forging a new path.
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Popstache
Rest easy, Blackstar. You left us with one hell of a goodbye.
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The National
Typically inventive and typically cool, Blackstar is an excellent return that deploys a useful old trick: recruiting fresh blood to oxygenate that of the band leader.
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Healthy Music obsession
Blackstar, is a musically diverse, powerful and poignant album, and whilst it is probably Bowie’s strangest and eeriest project, I fully expect that it will be remembered as one of his best.
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Jazztimes
Blackstar might be neither jazzy nor accessible, but it’s impossible to turn away from.
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Daily Review
If Blackstar is looking towards the future then we face a grim prospect – it’s dark, it’s lean, it’s schizophrenic – it’s what a Bowie album in 2016 should sound like.
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The List
Blackstar may be his last, or it may be far from it, but it would be a wonderful and still-essential way to bow out.
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The Firenote
“Blackstar” goes out with a bang, not a whimper. A mature, calculated performance, in a genre that stretches beyond anything we’ve previously heard from this ever evolving artist.
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The Bridge
this album shows that David Bowie truly was an artist in everything he did.
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Cryptic Rock
Blackstar gave fans what Bowie wanted everyone to remember him by; an album on his own terms by a man who lived on his own terms.
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THE PROG MIND
Blackstar is undeniably one of the most important works of art of this decade so far, and at times is a brilliantly fitting conclusion to the life of a brilliant man, with two songs that I would probably name as my two favourites thus far in 2016 being here.
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Louden in Stereo
Blackstar is a hip hop album – far from it, but in the endless cycle of limp repetition that’s come to characterise most modern ‘rock’ records it makes sense that Bowie should be channelling two artists who are genuinely exciting and whose own music, while fitting into the ‘hip hop’ category, eschews compositional cliches.
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Hit the Floor Magazine
Bowie has clearly put as much thought and purpose into making his lyrics enigmatic as many artists do in making their message as clear as possible.
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The McGill Tribune
Bowie’s vocal and emotional range paints a colourful and honest picture of facing death, whether it be through defiance, fear, acceptance, or resignation.
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STUFF
In a bewildering and unsettling return, Bowie uses all the tropes at his disposal, drama, tension, lyrical obliqueness, inscrutability and skittish studio skulduggery, forcing the listener on a journey that demands attention to detail, a Sherlock Holmes-ian ability to decipher clues and yet marvel at how a 69-year-old can conjure up something so radically new that only the shaking of the head will suffice.
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METROPOLIS
Lyrically, David Bowie’s 25th studio album wasted no time pandering to commercial clichés, and often even dispensed with the artifices of rhyming and meter. Keeping to the mission at hand, themes of parting, death, and the afterlife are recurrent.
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Vanity Fair
Blackstar is haunted by mortality.
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the socc.org
every track on Blackstar is excellent. The music is off-kilter, experimental, even occult or unsettling in places. But despite this the songs have strong hooks, catchy melodies, and are beautifully arranged.
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Music Connection
Bowie croons from station to station through the iconic sonic signposts of his career (the art rock, the kraut rock and his ‘90s drum and bass muse all present). He is the UberBowie, and his Blackstar is the monolith.
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Adrian Denning
Many can view Bowie as merely a singer, but it is often forgotten he was a multi-instrumentalist himself. The 'Blackstar' album demos by all accounts feature Bowie sketching out the Saxophone lines that McCaslin plays and enhances upon for the finished product.
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MUSE
David Bowie's morose, claustrophobic final studio album sits amongst his finest in a distinguished career.
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Something Else reviews
Blackstar is of course carefully crafted but you also get the sense that some of the tracks were recorded in a single take — as there are little quirks, instrumental trips and even tiny vocal slip ups which have not been corrected maybe because they add to the rawness of some of the sections.
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LEXGO
Blackstar might seem bleak and distant — a scrapbook of sparse soundscapes built around varying rhythms, McCaslin’s myriad sax sounds and Bowie’s often chantlike singing. But the music is continually rhythmic.
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Red Dirt Report
Blackstar, I should note, is not just a mere record album. It is much more than that. It’s a message. An event. The stunning and courageous final act of one of the most brilliant entertainers and public figures of our era.
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Boppin's Blog
This album was his last kick at the cat, and he wanted to do it his way. This is not some corporate obligation album. This is David Bowie, doing what he does best in the 21st century.
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Aesthetic Magazine
Blackstar proves the rarity of rock stars like David Bowie. Every tribute that pours in is (rightly) in awe of him, but Bowie always preferred to be the one in awe of his contemporaries. The saxophone that weaves its way through David Bowie’s final album represents what he loved most; being a student and a vessel for the joy only music can bring. In the story of David Bowie, Blackstar is the epilogue, as it turns out.
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RAWCKUS Magazine
this is a great album that I do not like very much…yet.
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The EDGE
Blackstar certainly works as the perfect final album for such an influential and distinctive artist.
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Ground Control Magazine
Blackstar will excitedly proclaim that David Bowie has done it again; he’s been reborn or rejuvenated like Lazarus on his twenty-fifth album. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true.
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Duluth News Tribune
The album is good, indeed. It’s brilliant in spots, as are most Bowie releases. But it’s now become meaningful as the final movement in the symphony of a life that Bowie had, and that makes it more special than perhaps the music or the song structures themselves would otherwise have made it.
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This Way Up
`Blackstar` is certainly one of the most unexpected detours in a career full of such left turns.
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UNCUT
This is what Blackstar feels like: the beginning of a new Bowie phase, one that may turn out to be as uncompromising and creatively volatile as anything that has preceded it.
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CrowsNest
Much of the record wraps the listener in tight, as dark tendrils of saxophone and jazz instrumentation wail out complicated solos.
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WRMC
Blackstar is intricate but desolate, both optimistic and rife with the inevitability of mortality.
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The Monitors
Blackstar is something new. Something different. Something unique and strange and beautiful.
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Yorkshire Evening Post
A fitting sign off from the man who changed music forever.
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WDCV 88.3
Jazz dances throughout Blackstar, paired with Bowie’s avant-garde leanings and rock sensibilities into a dense, artsy declaration of purpose.
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