PEAK
Kerry Leimer | Makawao, Hawaii United States | 11/09/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)
"For those of us who lived through the LP era, it's both nostalgic and encouraging to see releases like this returned from the gleaming plastic horrors of the jewel case to the pliant, yielding warmth of a paper sleeve. And while the mini-lp package is mostly a marketing affectation, in this case it offers the chance to revisit a remarkable record.
Low represents a high of sorts, being a most visible album by a very visible artist to embrace some of the many promising and evocative aspects of experimentation in popular forms. Below the radar and before the Low, the breakthroughs of Eno's early solo albums, his astounding first collaboration with Robert Fripp, the synchronous outpourings of Cluster, Neu and others set a new direction in intelligent, art-inflected meta-pop / meta-rock already in full flight towards refining a new musical aesthetic.
Fripp brought musicianship to Eno's open loop heuristics, uniting virtuosic playing with a systems approach to composition. Neu explored the trance of repetition with a Warholian sense of expediency. Harmonia and Cluster employed obvious and mechanized pop-art style execution, like the overt predominance and automatic solutions of rhythm boxes, bringing synthesizers to the forefront. As a listener who had followed all these and other artists individually it was remarkable and reassuring to find them and/or their ideas suddenly meet up right here. The results are the spare, unadorned, precise, perverse and sometimes inverted song structures that represent such a distinct departure for Bowie -- especially after the immediately preceding yet throwback Width-of-a-circle-ish rockers and crooning ditties comprising "Station to Station"-- and such a rich new vein for the form. As such, Low is an almost ideal hybrid of mainstream popular music and the still elegant and decidedly non-mainstream constructs typified by the work of the folks mentioned above.
By bringing in Eno and embracing many of his and others' ideas and techniques, Bowie made them his own and came out with a great Side One and an absolutely perfect Side Two. Low set the direction for the four-part trilogy (sic) that is Low / Heroes / Lodger / Scary Monsters, and across that span he even made it seem possible that popular music would not remain forever dumb and dumber. At least until, of course, he dropped Let's Dance..."
Low
Morton | Colorado | 09/26/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"David Bowie-Low *****
Low is one of Bowie's most breath taking endeavours as an artist. Released around the same time as Iggy Pop's The Idiot album (his first solo album) which Bowie himself helped to produce. The sounds are similar as is the quality. Released as part of the Berlin trilogy along with Lodger, and Heroes, but it is Low which shines the brightest.
From soaring sound-scape instrumentals like 'Speed Of The Life' the albums opener, to the ambient 'A New Career In A New Town' up through 'Art Decade' and the sublime 'Weeping Wall' Bowie shows his skill as a composer more than just a mere pop icon.
But the album is more than just instrumentation. 'Breaking Glass' is pure bliss, while 'What In The World' is purely haunting. 'Sound And Vision' might be Bowie at his most daring up to this point in his career. A guitar line and key line from Carlos Alomar and Brian Eno to perfectly accompany his lyrics. 'Be My Wife' is almost scary lyrically while the french poetry of 'Warszawa' and simplicity of 'Subterraneans' is almost angelic. But it is the poetry of 'Always Crashing In The Same Car' that rules the album. A song so truly amazing it is almost too good to be true.
Low may not have the overwhelming popularity of say, 'Ziggy Stardust' or Honky Dory, but it just might be David Bowie's crowning achievement from the 1970's."
Track Listings (11) - Disc #1