STATIONTOSTATION
| David Bowie
STATIONTOSTATION
Station to Station is the 10th studio album by English musician David Bowie, released by RCA Records in 1976. Commonly regarded as one of his most significant works, Station to Station was the vehicle for his performance persona, the Thin White Duke. The album was recorded after he completed shooting Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the cover artwork featured a still from the movie. During the sessions, Bowie was heavily dependent on drugs, especially cocaine, and later claimed that he recalled almost nothing of the production.
Musically, Station to Station was a transitional album for Bowie, developing the funk and soul music of his previous release, Young Americans, while presenting a new direction towards synthesisers and motorik rhythms that was influenced by German electronic bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk. This trend would culminate in some of his most acclaimed work with the "Berlin Trilogy", recorded with Brian Eno in 1977 79. Bowie himself said that Station to Station was "a plea to come back to Europe for me".
The album's lyrics reflected his preoccupations with Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, mythology and religion. Blending funk and krautrock, romantic balladry and occultism, Station to Station has been described as "simultaneously one of Bowie's most accessible albums and his most impenetrable".[3] Preceded by the single "Golden Years", it made the top five in both the UK and US charts. In 2012, the album was ranked No. 324 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. - Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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pitchfork- Reissue-Deluxe Edition
The new master perfectly mediates between the album's surface elegance and underlying menace.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Review
Wow, this is really good.
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Medium
COCAINE! The opening title track is 10-minutes long. It’s his first real move toward electronic rhythms and synthesizers. It’s good, but it’s a transitional album, which leads us directly to …
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Don Ignacio
very much the same sort of funky R&B album that Young Americans was except this is far weirder. And when it comes to David Bowie, the weirder it gets the better.
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John Mcferrin
This album, simply put, is stupendous. All Bowie fans should own it, of course, and anybody who claims to be a serious fan of 70's rock music but doesn't own this album is a liar.
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Adrian Denning
It's a confusing album for me, a record that seems to have considerable hidden depths, yet ultimately, these self-same hidden depths appear to be all cloak and daggers. David, despite a couple of stellar vocal performances, seems obviously disconnected to the musicians around him.
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Robert Christgau
Miraculously, Bowie's attraction to black music has matured; even more miraculously, the new relationship seems to have left his hard-and-heavy side untouched.
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Mark Prindle
this album is diverse - it is NOT a natural follow-up to anything he's done before. And it's a lot of fun to listen to the whole way through. Definitely one of his best, if not his absolute best.
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The Guardian
Station to Station manages to incorporate almost everything fantastic about pop music: it's dramatic, stylish, emotional and danceable.
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RollingStone
Living an L.A. nightmare, singer-songwriter embraced “nasty” alter ego and made a classic.
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ALL MUSIC
Station to Station is a transitional album that creates its own distinctive style. Abandoning any pretense of being a soulman, yet keeping rhythmic elements of soul, David Bowie positions himself as a cold, clinical crooner and explores a variety of styles.
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Soundblab
Station To Station is one of my favorite albums of all time.
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The Quietus
Station to Station he turns his gaze fully inward upon his own condition, and finds the creeping decay at work there too. It's a pre-punk album, not just chronologically (recorded in ten days at the end of 1975), but in recognising the hollow, bloated state of the rock aristocracy of which Bowie was a part.
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CoS
The songs on Station to Station are composed of a fusion of soul, rock, funk, and disco, twisted by an influence of experimental German artists. When singing as The Thin White Duke, Bowie sounds completely withdrawn from the emotions that the songs convey.
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Classic Rock Review
a transitional album for David Bowie. Musically, this 1976 album seamlessly bridges the gap between soul and glam rock of Bowie’s early 1970s work and the experimental, synth-driven “krautrock” works to come later in the decade. This was also one of the last album’s where Bowie employed a musical alter ego with “The Thin White Duke” persona.
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AV/MUSIC
Station To Station hangs suspended between Bowie’s past and future, reviving Young Americans’ soulful croon and its predecessors’ science-fiction distance while favoring ambiance and repetition over hooks.
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Steve Hoffman
'Station to Station' is an exceptional album and one that's ensured to stay with anybody who witnesses it, surpassing the already-brilliant 'Young Americans'.
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popMATTERS
Station to Station, with its track-by-track stylistic changes, and pervasive mood of existential crisis, reflects this immeasurably. It's also, quite simply, a damn good record.
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APHORISTIC ALBUM REVIEWS
Station To Station has a unique place in Bowie discography – it’s the transition between the soul sound of Young Americans and the electronic experiments of Low, but the odd mixture of styles gives it a singular identity.
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CLASH
‘Station To Station’ inhabits a staggering musical landscape, borne out of a formidable band, an electric frontman and a truckload of cocaine.
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DROWNED IN SOUND
Station To Station it simply acts as a gateway for Bowie to work his way into a mixture of crushed balladry and taut funk workouts.
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The Escapist
Station to Station is art rock.
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Only Solitaire
At the crossroads. Damn fine crossroads, though - halfway between Philly soul and Eno electronica...
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No Ripcord
As this was for Bowie a transitional pitstop, a literal layover from station to station brought on by the influx of American sound, designer opiates and theology, Station To Station is regarded as a turning point in his creative progression.
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PUNKNEWS.ORG
It's a simple funk beat, drained of its heat and turned into a robotically precise jam.
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The Music Box
ranks among the finest outings that Bowie has ever recorded.
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Contact Music
Despite (as he now admits) effectively recording it from underneath a mountain of cocaine, despite having spent the previous decade continually changing both persona and genre, and despite working hard to ensure that it sounded little like the records that preceded it, Bowie managed to create a unified piece of pop art, a single-minded exploration of a particular sound.
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Psycho Babble
a modest masterpiece.
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