David Bowie's final album, Blackstar

David Bowie's final album was released last week Friday. I was in a book store in Las Cruces on Thursday and saw the notice on the wall behind the register and was looking forward to it, obviously I wasn't prepared for it to be his final album. But he clearly knew it was likely to be his last work, and he put a lot in to it.

I picked it up yesterday at lunch and listened to it twice, and I quite like it.

The title track, which is also the first track, is very different and it's long, clocking in at over 9 minutes. It's almost two songs. The rest of the album is a little more conventional (compares well with his previous work) and very good. There's a lot of familiarity to it, some tracks are reminiscent of Black Tie White Noise, others evoke images of earlier work.

All in all, an excellent album and a great capstone to his career and life.

I'd like to talk more specifically about individual tracks, but I leant the disc to my boss and my iMac is in the shop, which holds my music collection and is also what I sync my iPhone to, so I can't load it on my phone right now which makes me very unhappy (CURSE YOU, APPLE, FOR NOT LETTING US SYNC OUR iDEVICES ON MULTIPLE COMPUTERS!)


Anyway, it is an excellent album and I highly recommend it.


Also, I recommend Wil Wheaton's remembrance of working on a film in the early '80s with Susan Sarandon and her turning him on to Bowie's Space Oddity via a cassette in a Sony Waklkman. It's a very good story.