Artist: Bowie, David
Label: EMI Records
Release: 2007
(reissue, 2007)
“The Buddha Of Suburbia” is the logical stepping stone between “Black Tie White Noise” and “Outside”. Dance-leaning pop rock with a dash of prog, or let’s rather call them art touches, typical of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy Low – Heroes – Lodger. For this one Bowie took a step back and looked over his own catalog. That doesn’t exactly elevate him to the manifesto of some “new rock messiah”, but after “Black Tie White Noise” it delivers a fresh new album that’s thoroughly easy on the ears.
The name Brian Eno is once again a massive inspiration for Bowie. “The Buddha Of Suburbia” is a mix of pop dance rock soaked in curtains of electronic keyboards and transcendental electronic sound samples. Bowie once more strolls through simple moves and stacks them into an exciting, layered musical picture, crowned by David’s unmistakable vocal approach. In places the vocals are pared right down, and the verses, deliberately minimalist at times, work like a narration run through cyber-futurist effects, creating a one-of-a-kind atmosphere. That’s especially true where the riffs disappear and the dance beat gets a heavy push alongside “neo-soul” touches (spices of trumpet, electronic background samples) – the track Sex And the Church and then South Horizon, where the woodwinds are joined by that unique “Bowie-ism”, Garson’s piano. The latter doesn’t hide its pronounced soul/jazz chill-out elements. The title track, which opens the album, doesn’t hide its mild Hindu melo-tricks (read: the choice of melody), sounds majestic and assured, and in that role even reminds you a little of Come Talk To Me by Peter Gabriel from his album “Us” (1992), although as a piece of music it’s cut from entirely different cloth. The fourth track, The Mystery, calms the album down completely, since Brian Eno’s obsession is that first moment of transcendence, built on layers of drifting, gentle collage of electronic samples. Another moment of this kind of atmosphere, based on a “landscape of sounds”, comes with Ian Fish, U.K. Heir, whose drifting background samples David Gilmour could easily have used for a solo in the “post-Waters” Pink Floyd era. A winning combination of eighties dance pop rock and electronic futurism brings a total change of atmosphere and dynamics to the album in Bleed Like A Craze, Dad. Picture a Let’s Dance beat and a curtain of samples, eaten through by Bowie’s classic tricks (distorted dissonant guitar spices and “Aladdin Sane” classical piano). Bowie simply cares about simplicity, catchiness, and preserving and emphasizing the melody. His verses stay pared down to just a few lines that repeat throughout the track. They’re carefully dosed, rationally measured out, added in tiny amounts. The best-known track and by far the catchiest is the beauty Stangers When We Met, with its Roxy Music art rock flirtation caught in the net. It continues the story of Bleed Like a Craze, Dad, but much more confident and convincing, in Bowie’s unique shoes, which easily puts the song among David’s greatest classics. A similar touch can be found in Untitled No. 1. Then a leap to early-eighties synth pop new wave, with a pinch of Kraftwerk in Dead Against It, which in anyone else’s hands could have sounded aggressively intrusive to the ears, but here there’s Bowie’s hypnotically clean and soft vocal, which softens the track with magical effect and masterfully adds that appealing Bowie charm.
The album “The Buddha Of Suburbia” first came out in late 1993, the same year Bowie reaffirmed himself with “Black Tie White Noise”. After the commercial flop of the Tin Machine project, Bowie carried on after “Black Tie White Noise” down a new path into himself with “The Buddha Of Suburbia” as well.
“The Buddha of Suburbia” is a David album that went overlooked on release, the result of clumsy reception and handling by the masses, and the blame for that has to be pinned on the label’s management. Because the album’s title track was included in the musical backdrop for the four-part TV series “The Buddha Of Suburbia”, whose script is based on the book of the same name by Hanif Kureishi, the album unluckily lost its “studio” label, replaced by the word “soundtrack”. What’s more, the title track single was pressed in several different editions, which added to the confusion on the market and pushed the masses even further away from an album that carries ten tracks in total. On top of all that, a very important brake was that the album only came out in the US in 1995, and so stayed in the shadow of David Bowie’s new, current studio release “Outside” (1995).
The reissue of this interesting studio album (!) this time sports a cover that’s actually a take on the one released for the American market in 1995, only this time we get a color version. The booklet also includes liner notes by David Bowie himself. All in all, it’s really nice to see “The Buddha Of Suburbia” returning to the shelves of record stores too.
With “The Buddha of Suburbia” Bowie in no way invented the light bulb, but the album also doesn’t hide the newfound artistic inspiration and Bowie’s new artistic resurrection sparkling through it. The guy certainly doesn’t sound convincingly consistent across the album, since he flirts a bit too obviously with the inspirations of other artists, but the title track, Bleed Like a Craze, Dad and Stangers When We Met can, no holds barred, be treated as real juicy Bowie creations. This time Bowie isn’t so much innovative, if at all, as inspired, which masterfully confirms his unique chameleon knack for slipping into fashion fads and coding them into his own attire, through which Bowie’s look back at his past solo excursions shines. A freshly inspired, multicolored tangle – given the innovation that accompanied classic Bowie up to and including “Let’s Dance” (1983), totally insignificant, but at the same time of significant reaffirming character! Let’s not forget this is a very nice overlooked studio album and not a backing track for a film.
Line-up
David Bowie – vocals, keyboards, synthesizer, guitar, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, electronic drum samples
Erdal Kizilcay – keyboards, trumpet, bass guitar, guitar, drums, percussion
3D Echo – drums, guitar on track 5
Mike Garson – classical piano on tracks 5 and 6
Lenny Kravitz – guitar on tracks 1 and 10
Production
David Bowie & David Richards
Track list
1. Buddha Of Suburbia
2. Sex And The Church
3. South Horizon
4. Mysteries
5. Bleed Like A Craze Dad
6. Strangers When We Meet
7. Dead Against It
8. Untitled
9. Ian Fish UK Heir
10. Buddha Of Suburbia
Running time: 55.26
ORIGINAL RELEASE: 1993
