brian_lettsin's Full Review: Scary Monsters [Blister] [Remaster] by David Bowie
It was over two years ago that I discovered David Jones, quickly fell under his spell and embraced his quite remarkable canon over a series of months. Since then, I have lost about five friends, all of whom labelled him overrated, have been accused of living in a glam-rock time warp and have built a popcorn shrine to the great man in my back yard. I have also avoided penning any reviews of the his unparalleled work, mainly because I am afraid that my words will never do justice to his brilliance, and that I would end up turning against him because of my syntactical ineptitude. Now that I have been promoted to top reviewer status, my fear has quelled considerably, and there is no need to worry anymore. Apparently this position gives me some authority, so I may as well use it to preach to the converted and to indulge in lots of circumlocutory derriere-kissing. This is one in a series of comprehensive reviews limited to his masterworks and lesser-known favourites, dealing mainly with the music, but including a necessary smattering of historical detail. I want to concentrate on why the music is so terrific (as though that wasn’t obvious) and avoiding offending Bowie scholars. This series, therefore, will concern itself with excessive flattery, repeated uses of the phrase “Jean Genius” and random noises of adoration such as “uhhh” or “wooo,” which are both terms of reverence in this small country that adjoins England and isn’t Wales. The review begins below.
*****
You know what it’s like. You’ve just recorded three of the most influential albums of the seventies down in Berlin with your old pal Brian Eno, re-establishing yourself as a considerable force in the world of music while kicking one of the largest cocaine habits in rock star history. What on earth do you do next? Do you retreat quietly into elderly rock statesman status, churning out below-par, introspective work and waiting for the day when your turn sixty so you can wheel out the oldies for your fans in large stadia? Or do you return back home to America and drop a miniature post-punk A-bomb on all the pretenders muscling in on your crown and pinching your ideas from the decade, thus resulting in one of the finest albums of your career? Or, do you just enrol in a night course at the local college and covert to Marxism? Guess which one Bowie did (after the Marxism).
‘Scary Monsters’ is an utterly brilliant album, designed as the apotheosis of all Bowie’s seventies work, and the record with which he kissed goodbye to his genius forever. Once he severed his ties with the record company RCA, things did not exactly go the way he wanted for about fifteen to twenty years, but we shan’t dwell on that for too long. This is the hardest rocking album he has ever made, and conceptually as much of a hellish vision of the future as a sly riposte to the music business as one will ever hear within the space of forty-five minutes. There are some fiendishly catchy and dark ‘electro-pop’ singles such as the infamous ‘Ashes To Ashes’ or the immortal anthem ‘Fashion,’ but the electrifying guitar work of long-time cohorts Carlos Alomar and Robert Fripp steals the show hands down, especially on the ghoulish title track, the sledgehammer opener ‘It’s No Game’ or the sprawling epic ‘Teenage Wildlife.’ The record plays like something of loose concept album, about what I am not really sure, but the lyrically curious pieces such as the carpet-bomb ‘Scream Like A Baby’ or the distinctively new-wave ’Up The Hill Backwards,’ are just there to provide fear, squalor and paranoia in barrowfuls.
Bowie seems anxious here to make parallels with the past and the future, whilst firmly drawing a line under this stage of his career. In may respects, therefore, this plays like one of the finest rock exorcism albums ever written, whereon Bowie kisses goodbye to straight-up hard rock, reminds his post-punk peers of the legacy he built, then jacks it all in to make eighties dance pap. One moment he tips his hat to the burgeoning New York crowd by covering (rather poorly) Television’s ‘Kingdom Come,’ and the next he invites legendary Who guitarist Pete Townshend to jam on ‘Because You’re Young,’ almost achieving a sense of temporal unity and stitching his rock history together quite capably. The two parts of the same song here also bookend the album quite nicely, and further the rather meticulous resolution he develops; the first half raucous and the second rather ending rather tame. ‘Scary Monsters’ would be the last of his albums to reach the top of the charts in Britain, and he has never achieved such a level of success as this (sales-wise) to date, although he clearly has produced a slue of overlooked albums on a par with this. The players here are Dennis Davis, George Murray, Carlos Alomar, Chuck Hammer, Robert Fripp, Roy Bittan, Andy Clark, Pete Townshend, Tony Visconti, Chris Porter and Michi Hirota.
1. It’s No Game (Part One) (4:18)
Bowie makes his feelings well-known from the get-go here with this thunderous opener, introducing us to the mighty storm-squall guitars and his broken-bottle vocals. One should be prepared to brace oneself. After some muffled effects of a spray can, the guitars and drums come crashing down across the spoken-word Japanese vocals of Michi Hirota, and the tension, panic and impending doom comes shrieking out of the stereo at the listener. The emphasis here is clearly on making as much racket as humanly possible, as well as scaring us out of our wits, and Fripp cakes the music with scorching solos across layers of police-siren, Fender-bending work from Alomar and Davis’ pounding drums. “Silhouettes and shadows, watch the revolution/ No more, free steps to heaven!” Bowie screams; quite easily his most bowel-imploding vocal turn on disc. A bouncy piano phrase is added for the one and only modulation while Bowie concludes rather grimly through snarling, techno-cockney vocals: “Put a bullet in my brain and it makes all the papers!” The vocal overdubs are also cranked up incredibly high in the mix, and keep what is a remarkable opener on fire until Fripp allows his guitar to wail just a little too much, causing the terminal plea from Bowie: “Shut up!” An inspired (and frankly quite bonkers) opener.
2. Up The Hill Backwards (3:14)
One of the more overlooked tracks on here, this feels somewhat incongruous sandwiched between the raging opener and the thundering title track, but is an amiable little electro-pop number of some distinction. After some jittery acoustic guitar intro, the bass and drums bounce in across the squished guitar lines, charging into what sounds at first like a full-blown rave-up. It most definitely isn’t. The track then, rather bizarrely, jumps into a more breezy, new-wave melody while Bowie sings his incredibly vague vocals over keyboard backing, hammering home the lyric: “It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it.” On the face of it, this track would appear to be a skewered attack on all of Bowie’s pretenders than anything else, ending with the caustic afterthought: “I’m OK, you’re so-so.” Fripp keeps the proceedings suitably noisome throughout, leaking out some fiddly solos between the bouncy verses like splodges of acid across the music. The drums remain suitably harsh in the background and the acerbic, snarling tone here is still present while the track gallops into a more cacophonous part in the last minute. This is more of a rave-up, showcasing some virtuoso guitar work from Fripp over the blistering thump of Davis’ drums.
3. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (5:11)
Perhaps the finest of the two centrepieces on the album, this piece is the perfect culmination of all the paranoia and anxiety throughout his seventies work. The lesson he imparts to us all here, after years spent dancing where the dogs decay, is that scary monsters (and super creeps) will always keep you running. Running scared, in fact. It may not make you sleep snugly in your bed tonight, but that is the truth, writ Bowie. From the off, this is a nightmarish sonic assault which still sounds eye-popping today, and demonstrates some of the most blistering guitar work from Alomar and Fripp on record. The two players wrestle with one another to make the most noise and create the eeriest sounds, and the result is an orgy of dystopian, apocalyptic chaos and panic; almost outshining the cameo from Townshend later on. The tinderbox introductory phrase from Alomar burns brightly, then peters out over the razor-sharp, napalm-drop assault of Fripp, who sounds as though he has set his guitar ablaze throughout. One relentless acoustic guitar overdub is added, and strums ferociously in the background while Bowie affects his techno-cockney accent once again for the verses: “She had a horror of rooms, she was tired you can’t hide beat/ And when I looked in her eyes, they were blue but nobody home.”
His vocals have been digitised especially for the catchy chorus, and although such technical jiggery-pokery could sound somewhat out of date, here it works perfectly well and causes the listener to leap suddenly from their seat. Fripp treats us to about forty solos in between each of the verses and the keyboards, played by Bowie, provide a surreptitious little pulse for the rest of the melody to rage across. The final minute is by far the most disconcerting end to any of the tracks here, as Bowie wails over a layer of robotic mess, giving the album a real sense of panic and sleaze synonymous with music of this decade. The guitars then screech the sound of fifty malfunctioning robots entering their death throes; thus providing an adequately warped and mucky denouement to this wonderful track.
4. Ashes To Ashes (4:23)
Chuck Hammer was drafted in for this haunting track with possibly the oddest accompanying video ever made. Bowie refers back to his ‘Space Oddity’ era character and portrays a more desolate individual emerging at the end of the seventies, one struggling to go cold turkey and kick the habit. Over some funky slap bass, squiggly shards of guitar and the primary layer of weird synth, the main guitar twinkles the distinctively Japanese intro. The verses then enter lightly with Bowie singing in a more redemptive falsetto throughout, building up gently with some scrambling vocal overdubs while the synthesiser rises solemnly towards the emotional chorus: “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom’s a junkie/ Strung out in heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.” The first trip through the verse and to the chorus is quick, rather deliberately akin to a drug come-down, and the retro sound of the guitars juxtaposed with the dread of the industrial synth works to a disconcertingly powerful effect. The chorus is the most haunting thing on the album, and this one reaches some of the murky emotional depths achieved on ‘Station To Station,’ although was recorded under different circumstances than said LP, of course. Excellent.
5. Fashion (4:48)
An unbelievably catchy piece of music, this was the sort of composition Bowie strived to remake again throughout the eighties but never achieved the same level of success as this little camp marvel. Some pulsing percussion wobbles commence proceedings before Fripp and his guitar dominate the track. He is quite easily the hero of this record, and although kudos should go to Bowie for his prolificacy so soon after the Berlin trilogy, this record would look shabby without his blazing contribution. His solo rips through the gentle intro and the bouncy melody, and then progresses through a series of twisty and spiky parts across the jaunty handclaps. Although it can hard to know what to make of lyrics such as “We are the goon squad and we’re coming to town, beep-beep,” this is still a triumph in spite of such blatant nonsense. The verses are effortlessly enjoyable, supported merely by staccato flourishes of synthesiser but allowing Fripp to spray his burning guitar across the entire tune. The track then ends with the refrain which makes little sense when printed but is a glorious thing to sing along to nonetheless.
6. Teenage Wildlife (6:54)
This majestic rock epic slates more overtly all of the toffee-nosed pretenders emerging from Bowie’s shadows, although is perhaps not the grand, magnificent number it strives to be. Driven by a relentless drum beat, the track coasts by on the defiant growls of the main guitar with Bowie’s grand vocals, and he puts the boot into his colleagues on numerous occasions, most scabrously here: “Same old thing in brand new drag comes sweeping into view/ As ugly as a teenage millionaire pretending it’s a whiz kid world.” Apart from one perhaps not so unusual modulation where the track bounces into a whimsical piano-led passage, most of this track maintains the steady rock growl and powers along courtesy of the soaring arrangements and magnificent guitar work. It is possibly the least listener-friendly piece here, simply because of the sheer length of it all, but it manages to be captivating for its duration, even if you can’t make out a word of what he is screeching.
7. Scream Like A Baby (3:35)
With more of a glam-rock stomp behind it, this dramatic rocker comes charging in and takes no prisoners for its entire running time, hitting incredibly frantic highs within the space of a few meagre seconds. Some tribal drums bang in over dread-filled, panicky guitars while Bowie relates the tale of some poor chap called Sam, another Orwellian concoction of his; up against some evil homophobic tyrants. The synthesisers provide plenty of the technological menace, but Bowie’s turn at the vocals completely dominates the entire track, although even he cannot suppress the camp from seeping through in the performance. The final bridge deploys some technological warping in the production room and makes for a rather disturbing last flourish: “No athletic program, no discipline, no book, he just sat in the back seat/ Swearing he’d seek revenge but he jumped in the furnace, singing old songs we loved.” Another little gem which finds itself safe from the ravages of technological advancement.
8. Kingdom Come (3:44)
I must admit, I have never really cared for this cover version, as I feel Bowie is beneath doing Tom Verlaine covers. Still, fans of Television will appreciate the nod, if no one else. It all depends on how enamoured you are with that band, and if you can take Bowie attempting to mimic the idiosyncratic slink of Verlaine’s voice. The only clunker on the album.
9. Because You’re Young (4:52)
The last gem of the album, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and welcome Mr. Peter Townshend to the record. He does, of course, have one of the most instantly recognisable guitar sounds in the known universe and here delivers a scintillating turn, lifting what could have been a piece of new-wave tosh into one of the standout highlights of the album. After some distinctive chugging across the howl of synths, the track leaps into his wailing solo which is so incredible it almost overwhelms the rest of the music around him. Bowie’s vocals here are less impressive but fortunately Townshend peaks through the verses as they become overwhelmed by jumpy synth parts. The chorus here is much lighter than the noise generated by Townshend, who returns after the first two minutes for a reprise of that fabulous little passage. The synthesisers rise with a ghoulish, hymnal melody like some paean for dead robots, and towards the end the music is in danger of overwhelming itself, but luckily it all comes together in the end, so everyone is all right. God bless you, Mr Townshend.
10. It’s No Game (Part 2) (4:22)
A much tamer version of the opener, here Bowie just croons his lyrics over some light chugs from the guitars and a more relaxed beat from the drums. This track does sound equally enjoyable without the ludicrously over the top vocals and the Japanese woman, buts doesn’t exactly end the album on an original note. It all bows out with a dignified thrust rather than a defiant yelp, which is a touch disappointing it must be said. He also adds an equally bizarre final lyric to this part: “Children round the world, putting camel sh*t on the walls/ Making carpets on treadmills or garbage sorting.” The album ends properly with an ambiguous noise, which sounds like a slot machine emptying, but I have no real idea what it is.
David Bowie: Scary Monsters (45:36)
People often cite this record as the last great Bowie album. Is it really a classic the whole way through, from start to finish, just like Aladdin Sane or Ziggy Stardust were, Brian? Well, no is the answer. That cover of ‘Kingdom Come’ is dreadful, and the reprise of ‘It’s No Game’ suggests Bowie was running out of ideas towards the end of recording and could not write a powerful denouement to his album. Aside from these gripes, there really are no problems with the rest of the material on this, however. It is stellar, top-shelf Bowie and certainly any collection would seem deprived without this wonderful record sandwiched between ‘Reality’ and ‘Space Oddity.’ You really cannot afford to ignore the cameo from Mr Townshend, the astonishing guitar work from Robert Fripp and another top-notch production job from Visconti and Bowie himself. It is also one of his most accessible albums to date, and actually one of the best records to buy if you are an absolute newcomer to the man. Terrific, terrific, terrific and very terrific.
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