Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Bowie, David
Label: EMI Records
Released: 1974
Rating: 4.5/5
With “Diamond Dogs” Bowie took the new-wave streak of the “glam rock” movement to its absolute peak and crowned himself the definitive king of the pop scene in 1974, with the record and its singles landing at the top of every chart imaginable, across Europe and, at long last, in the US too. 1974 was therefore Bowie’s year on the pop scene, no question. The asexual hybrid of many galaxies, a thousand faces and bodies kept the whole bag of dress-up tricks that had helped him build his cult persona. The red, spiky hair got even more dangerously spiky!
“Diamond Dogs” is a concept album. Even as a kid Bowie was obsessed with reading Orwell, and the idea of Orwellian dystopia in “1984” was tailor-made for him, since his lyrics on earlier albums were already going after societal decadence, emotional numbness, moral paralysis and the one-dimensional thinking of the masses in the Western system. In other words, the mass that blindly follows the word of the state apparatus, that treats warmongering as normal, the police as a given, and rules, bans and permissions dictated by someone else as completely everyday, simply a necessary and acceptable thing so it can feel safe. So how do you sell a morality that leads to the total devaluation of the individual’s integrity in exchange for a feeling of security? Security in material comfort. Look how well today’s society fits everything that one of the most sensitive musicians in rock history sensed back in 1974, when he masterfully characterized his vision of a universal deluge by turning Orwell into poetry! “Diamond Dogs” is a short, sharp revival of all of Bowie’s horrifying apocalyptic visions of the future of Western society.
The new album is an absolute step up from “Aladdin Sane” (1973). Why? It’s simply the most “Bowie-esque” of all his albums up to that point. This time David was even more focused, more fired up and more committed to his work in the studio. He went even harder at showing off raw “Bowie-ness”. This is the warped reach of early-seventies rock’n roll, with a unique dose of deliberate out-of-tune wobble that comes down first and foremost to Bowie’s singing and the mangled, distorted guitar and keys, while he artfully layered on extraordinary touches of wind arrangements and backing vocal harmonies. That was also the key with which he not only defined the whole individuality of his own expression but also pulled the apathetic early-seventies rock’n roll scene out of its rut. He thereby shut up all those music fans who grumbled about the explosion of the progressive rock bands of the day, Genesis, ELP, Yes and King Crimson. On top of that, the horizons of rock’n roll looked completely exhausted. Then Bowie shows up, turns everything upside down, sets off a real revolution (“boewiemania”) and a new bloom of pop rock begins. If Bowie once identified with Ziggy Stardust, this time he only wanted to show the landscape and the cities Ziggy Stardust comes from. That is, where David Bowie himself comes from. Ziggy was long gone, so the Spiders From Mars no longer made sense either. Of the “spiders from Mars” Bowie kept only pianist Mike Garson in the lineup for the studio sessions; the bass was played by Herbie Flowers, one of the better British bassists of the time, Alan Parker played lead guitar, and Ansley Dunbar and Tony Newman pounded the drums. So Bowie sensed that the Spiders From Mars concept had run its course and that a completely new creative musical direction was needed. On top of that, on “Diamond Dogs” he also played additional saxophones, keyboards and guitars. As an out-of-the-ordinary composer, arranger and producer, Bowie once again held all the reins in his own hands.
His head was racing with ideas, and in the studio that turned into an incredibly varied palette of everything the new album had to offer. After an obscure “a capella” intro, the record opens with the exceptionally hard rock’n roll kick of Diamond Dogs. Bowie never sounded this hard and compact as a rocker again. One of the album’s peaks is the trilogy Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise), a mix of pop rock and the avant-garde, exploratory rock detours of the day. The mini suite takes us through a gorgeous palette of different moods, with the motifs masterfully stacked together! This suite and Rock’n Roll With Me, one of the album’s three singles, already point toward the post-glam period and its much subtler successor “Young Americans” (1975). Rebel, Rebel, released as a single, doesn’t hide Bowie’s sympathy for the Rolling Stones. The beat propped up by tambourines, the riff run through a sharp reverb effect and the vocal lines themselves are pure “stones”, while 1984, with its added strings, is a proper “Barry White disco pop seventies meets rock’n roll” excursion. On this record Bowie also used the studio as an “additional instrument” effectively for the first time. He wins us over especially with the superb theatrical finale in Big Brother, brilliantly seasoned with wind arrangements that create a dramatically tense “double” mood of subtlety (pre-chorus) and rocker aggression (chorus). That spills unpredictably into the instrumental exit from the record, Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family, the cherry on top of the album. It’s really a dance of the living dead in honor of Big Brother. “Uuuh” and “brrr”, chilling beyond all limits.
The music and the mood are icy, bringing the chosen concept to life in the best way possible. It’s not hard to picture dark gray concrete masses rising into the eternal black of a sky saturated with thick fog and sour, toxic vapor, where only the hissing of vent pipes and the chimneys of giant factories breaks the deathly silence. People are as alike as two peas in a pod, all living the same way, waiting for orders, obeying, faithfully following Big Brother. A real nightmare is conjured up!
This is an album with its own peculiar atmosphere, like all of Bowie’s best work. It’s the epitaph of glam rock, which David definitively defined (and to a large extent founded), since soon after he morphed like a chameleon into a more “earthly creature” and started trying his hand as a “soul” singer. With “Diamond Dogs” David Bowie left, or rather knowingly sank, “glam rock”. “Diamond Dogs” is therefore the swan song of an era and a work of art for all eternity. It’s the real deal, an album that sucks you whole into its world in a heartbeat. An obscure, doomed world of devaluation that sits very close to our everyday reality. The reality of “Diamond Dogs” therefore always hits the mark!
Lineup
David Bowie – vocals, guitar, saxophone, mellotron, moog (synthesizer)
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Alan Parker – guitar
Tony Visconti – string arrangements
Mike Garson – piano
Herbie FLowers – bass guitar
Aynsley Dunbar – drums
Tony Newman – drums
Production
David Bowie
Track list
CD1. (ORIGINAL LP):
1. Future Legend
2. Diamond Dogs
3. Sweet Thing
4. Candidate
5. Sweet Thing (Reprise)
6. Rebel Rebel
7. Rock ‘N’ Roll With Me
8. We Are The Dead
9. 1984
10. Big Brother
11. Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family
CD2. (BONUS CD):
1. 1984 / Dodo – (with The Spiders From Mars)
2. Rebel Rebel – (US single version)
3. Dodo
4. Growin’ Up
5. Alternative Candidate
6. Diamond Dogs – (K-Tel BEST OF Edit)
7. Candidate – (Intimacy mix)
8. Rebel Rebel – (2003)
