"Low", David Bowie, 1977
Dia: 9
Mês: Abril
Ano: 2013
Ano: 2013
Fabulously sponsored by José Carlos Soares.
O primeiro da "trilogia de Berlim" (seguido pelo "Heroes" e pelo "Lodger").
A ligação aqui continua a ser o Brian Eno, figura altamente influente na criação desta trilogia, a par com a produção do álbum de Tony Visconti e do próprio Bowie.
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (Penguin Books, 1990): Period of reclusiveness in Berlin, collaborating with Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, ended with new leap into avant-garde, with trio of electronic/synthesiser LPs: Low, Heroes, both '77, and Lodger, '79. Songs like "Sound & Vision", Warszawa", "Heroes" helped to launch generation of often imitative synth bands: Joy Division, Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, etc.
The Trouser Press Record Guide – Fourth Edition (Collier Books, 1991): Low, on which Bowie arranged to co-opt the modernistic sensibility of Brian Eno (his collaborator on three consecutive studio LPs), presents a selection of tracks that are not so much songs as word-paintings or, in many cases, simply mood pieces.
The A to X of Alternative Music (Continuum, 2004): Low is the best [of the three collaborative albums with Brian Eno]. Eno builds ambient sound-scapes for Bowie to construct songs within and around. The first part of the album is made up of new-wave meshings of guitars and keyboards and in the second half there are dense and dark pieces base around synthesizers, and resembling the progressive krautrock of bands like Neu! and Can, mixed with the floaty hymnal constructs of British band Jade Warrior. 'Tone poems' they were called, and 'Warszawa' is probably the most beautiful piece of music in Bowie's back catalogue, with chord changes determined randomly by a pre-arranged and unrelated system of dots on paper that correspond to a pre-recorded finger-clicks running throughout the track.
The Rolling Stone Album Guide – Third Edition (Random House, 1992): Bowie fashions a complex, yet somehow organic-sounding trilogy with Low, Heroes and Lodger. The first two albums evenly divide between shimmering pop-song experiments and rambling "ambient" instrumentals, but fully realized tracks like Low's "Sound and Vision" and the title track from Heroes calmly bridge the chasm between rock's old avant-garde and its bold new wave. ★★★1/2
AllMusic: Low is a dense, challenging album that confirmed his place at rock's cutting edge. Driven by dissonant synthesizers and electronics, Low is divided between brief, angular songs and atmospheric instrumentals. ★★★★★
Pitchfork: The first album in David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy sees Bowie as a tragic figure. The album's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed, while the blank, instrumental second side feels like a calculated attempt to kill the author. (...). Two decades after its release, Bowie noted that his crew "really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass." (...) The mostly instrumental second side is a tribute to the people of the Soviet Bloc – Poland on "Warszawa," and East Berlin on the remaining three songs – in which the elusive nature of side 1 subsides and Bowie's persona is subsumed into his and Eno's pulsating sequences. [10]
Rolling Stone: Listening to Low, you hear Kraftwerk and Neu!, maybe some Ramones, loads of Abba and disco. But Low flows together into a lyrical, hallucinatory, miraculously beautiful whole, the music of an overstimulated mind in an exhausted body, as rock's prettiest sex vampire sashays through some serious emotional wreckage. ★★★★★
Rolling Stone – How David Bowie, Brian Eno Revolutionized Rock on 'Low': In a career marked by sharp turns, Low might be David Bowie's sharpest – and most impressive. The first of Bowie's Berlin trilogy represents both a personal and aesthetic overhaul. With his coke-crazed L.A. days behind him, the artist found new life in Europe, which offered an escape from his megacelebrity status, as well as detox opportunities and a chance to harness new sounds, notably Germany's proto-techno "kosmische musik," also known as krautrock. From a creative and a political perspective, Bowie saw the divided city of Berlin as "the center of everything that is happening and will happen in Europe over the next few years." His intent was to "experiment; to discover new forms of writing; to evolve, in fact, a new musical language." That's pretty much what he did.
The Quietus – 40 Years On: David Bowie's Low Revisited: Leaving the psychosis of Los Angeles, fleeing to progressive Europe with accomplice Iggy Pop in tow, the melancholy of Berlin, a trans-Siberian train ride through Poland, the embracing of experimentation and of Brian Eno’s systems-based compositional techniques, Bowie’s rising from the ashes of addiction and obsession. The details of Low and its counterparts are so widely available and related to us in such microscopic ways that something like Adam Buxton’s parody of the recording sessions (brilliantly animated by The Brothers McLeod) is hilarious more or less entirely due to the strength of its accuracy of reference. (http://youtu.be/FODvjYoVEi8)
Observer – How David Bowie Perfected the Concept Album on ‘Low’: "It’s my reaction to certain places", Bowie himself explained to Tim Lott of The Record Mirror in 1977. "‘Warszawa’ is about Warsaw and the very bleak atmosphere I got from that city. ‘Art Decade’ is West Berlin – a city cut off from its world, art and culture, dying with no hope of retribution. ‘Weeping Wall’ is about the Berlin Wall – the misery of it. And ‘Subterraneans’ is about the people that got caught in East Berlin after the separation – hence the faint jazz saxophones’ representing the memory of what it was." (...) Forty years later, Low continues to do just that – formulating something both distinctively in time with the bleeding edge of 1977 yet layered with such forward-thinking artfulness it still cannot be properly matched in 2017. Low is an album that will make you dance, think and weep all in the span of 38 minutes and 26 seconds.
Pitchfork – The 100 Best Albums of the 1970s [N.1: 'Low']: As he detoxed from celebrity and controlled substances, he righted himself by immersing in art, striking up a collaboration with Brian Eno – former wildcard in Roxy Music – while retaining his partnership with Tony Visconti, the producer who first worked with Bowie in 1969. That continuity is a key factor in Low, a record that hurtles toward an undefined future while embracing ambiguity.
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