“I’ve got a handful of songs to sing”
The #1 best-selling musical soundtrack in the UK right now (according to Amazon), is the Lazarus Cast Album, due for release on October 21, four days before previews for @lazarusmusical start in London.
The Bowie originals on the album have been singled out for praise by both Neil McCormick at The Telegraph and Dorian Lynskey at The Guardian. Here follows edited excerpts from both.
No Plan is a gorgeous, slippery jazz ballad, sweet and sad, that sings out with an almost mystically prophetic quality, as if Bowie was reporting from beyond the grave: “All the things that are my life/ My moods/ My beliefs/ My desires/ Me alone/ Nothing to regret/ This is no place, but here I am.”
It is a song evoking the displacement of the production’s central character, Thomas Jerome Newton, The Man Who Fell to Earth, but the line between the alien Newton and Bowie’s alienation has been blurred since he starred in Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 film.
Killing A Little Time is a thrillingly chaotic rocker, unwinding from a long spiel of guitar feedback, rumbling bass and jerky drums, as Bowie’s strangulated vocal evokes fear and rage at his perilous state: “I’m falling man/ I’m choking man/ I’m fading man.”
As the track builds, the jazz sax gets dialled up amidst a cascade of woodwind, and the arrangement gets progressively looser and more disharmonic, whilst Bowie grapples with “this furious brain” evoking “This symphony/ This rage in me”, and proclaiming, “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing/ To stain the soul/ To f— you over.” If ever there was a song raging against the dying of the light, this is surely it.
The final new song, When I Met You, comes from the end of the play, and offers a welcome sense of solace and relief. It is an off kilter pop ditty, the jaunty melody of a Sixties beat jingle run through a sonic wringer, a rising and descending bass figure and Bowie strumming an out-of-rhythm acoustic guitar.
The song is a loving dedication to someone who has saved the singer from himself: “I was the walking dead/ I was kicked in the head/ I was too insane/ Could not trust the game/ Before I met you.”
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David Bowie’s last three songs: decoding the final transmission – by Dorian Lynskey – The Guardian
Each one has its own flavour. When I Met You is the kind of briskly anthemic, self-quoting rock that Bowie delivered on his 2013 comeback album The Next Day, climbing a ladder of chords to a stirring chorus, until a swarm of overlapping backing vocals knocks it sideways, giving it a stranger, more chaotic quality. Killing a Little Time has the same neurotic momentum as Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) and a touch of Outside’s 1990s industrial clamour, pitching Bowie’s sinisterly theatrical vocal into shrieking, churning jazz-rock. Mark Guiliana’s astonishing, tentacular drumming alone confirms that Bowie’s last band, led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin, was one of his best, capable of anything. Bowie sounds like a man coming apart — “I’m falling, man / I’m choking, man / I’m fading, man” — but it feels like Newton talking. Bowie is just the cracked actor.
The best of the three, No Plan, is also the one most likely to inspire literal readings. It’s an exquisitely lush, star-speckled torch song, which refracts the late-in-life stocktaking of Piaf or Sinatra through the stasis and fatalism of Talking Heads’ Heaven. “All the things that are my life / All my moves, my beliefs, my designs / Me alone, nothing to regret / This is no place but here I am / This is not quite yet,” Bowie croons. Taken alone, it would be a hell of a swansong (“Am I nowhere now?”) but play it beside the feverish discontent of Killing a Little Time and it loses its soothing finality. Again, these are numbers from a musical. They might feel movingly true at times but they’re stories, from a master storyteller.
All pre-orders instantly receive downloads of the cast versions of Life On Mars? (sung by Sophia Anne Caruso) and Lazarus (sung by Michael C. Hall). Don’t forget Jonathan Barnbrook’s animated visuals for both can be viewed here: http://smarturl.it/LazarusLOM and http://smarturl.it/LazarusVevo.
Go here for pre-order links, etc.
Meanwhile, Michael C. Hall will perform on The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One in the UK on Sunday. The programme airs for one hour from 9:00am.
#LazarusMusical #LazarusLondon #LazarusSoundtrack #Lazarus #TMWFTE #TJNewton