Review: David Bowie – Low (1977)

Low is David Bowie’s 11th studio album.

Low is the first installment of the “Berlin” trilogy, created in collaboration with producer Tony Visconti and creative visionary Brian Eno.

The flirtations with krautrock that began on Bowie’s Station To Station (1976) blossomed fully on Low. Bowie was extremely enthusiastic about krautrock bands such as Can, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Faust, and Neu!

In addition to a certain motorized mechanical quality, Low even seems to borrow its structure from the latter band’s album Neu! ’75 (1975). On that album, Neu! divided their music into a more melodic and conventional A-side and a more experimental B-side. Bowie’s Low clearly follows this division.

Bowie’s admiration for Neu! was so intense that he even asked Neu!’s guitarist Klaus Dinger to play on the Low album. Dinger’s blunt response was: “Thanks, but no thanks.”

The gap left by Dinger was filled by Bowie’s longtime musical partner Carlos Alomar and, particularly at Visconti’s initiative, guitarist Ricky Gardiner—a member of the prog band Beggars Opera—who was brought in for the sessions and tasked with performing the album’s few, but all the more brilliant, guitar solos.

The band is rounded out by the effective rhythm section familiar from Bowie’s previous two albums—Dennis Davis (drums) and George Murray (bass)—as well as a new recruit, keyboardist Roy Young, whose role ultimately remained quite limited, as Bowie or Brian Eno played most of the keyboard parts. Which brings us to Mr. Eno.

In addition to Krautrock, Bowie had also greatly enjoyed Roxy Music—specifically the final works of Brian Eno, who had embarked on a solo career in 1973—namely the ambient album Discreet Music (1975) and Another Green World (1975), which brilliantly blended pop, minimalism, and avant-garde. Low can easily be seen as a sort of fusion of Neu! 75’ and Another Green World, though naturally shaped in Bowie’s own distinctive style. Bowie has always been a master at picking up influences here and there and then using those elements to create something entirely new and uniquely his own.

Although Eno didn’t even receive a producer credit on Low, his influence on the album—and on Bowie more generally—was significant. Visconti has stated that Eno was Bowie’s Zen master. Visconti was the actual producer of Low, but Eno was the man who profoundly influenced Bowie’s thinking and had a wide-ranging impact on what the album Low ultimately became. Bowie, who was struggling to break free from drug addiction, was extremely open to new influences and, in many ways, longed for changes in his life. Musically as well.

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Eno taught Bowie entirely new ways of making music. Eno brought an element of randomness and abstraction to Bowie’s music. In his lyrics, Bowie had already used a cut-and-paste technique based on chance on Diamond Dogs, but Eno brought surprises—and reactions to them—into the music itself. He orchestrated these random elements using, among other things, his own deck of Oblique Strategies cards; reacting to the instructions—sometimes cryptic, sometimes very clear—led to surprising results that the artist might not otherwise have arrived at. Many other methods were also employed (for example, musicians were made to play their own parts without knowing anything about the others’ parts except the key, and the final song was ultimately constructed by editing these largely random elements) were experimented with, all intended to push the musicians further away from conventions and out of their comfort zones. Sometimes successfully, and sometimes without success.

In general, Eno encouraged Bowie to embrace unusual and unconventional results and to avoid the ordinary. The songs “Speed of Life” and “A New Career in a New Town” serve as excellent practical examples of this; following these suggestions, they remained instrumental even though Bowie had originally planned to write lyrics for them. Eno encouraged Bowie to avoid “normalizing” these songs.

”When Brian is around, Brian is in control, make no mistake about it, even more so than David, because he control’s David’s mind as well as David’s direction.”

– Carlos Alomar

Producer Tony Visconti’s role was more technical in nature (in some other organizations, he might have been credited simply as a sound engineer), but it was nonetheless quite significant in terms of the final result. The entire album is steeped in various effects, for which credit goes specifically to Visconti, who kept his finger on the pulse of the latest gear.

The most noteworthy of all the album’s sound solutions is the groundbreaking, slightly synthetic-sounding drum sound created by Visconti’s ingenious use of the Eventide H90 Harmonizer. The Harmonizer made it possible to lower or raise the pitch of a sound source without slowing down or speeding up the audio. This was revolutionary in 1977, and no other device could achieve the same result except for the brand-new Harmonizer, which was originally intended for vocal correction (essentially a prehistoric version of Auto-Tune). Visconti, however, came up with a much more creative way to use the device than its original intended purpose, and in the end, it played a very significant role in the unique overall sound of the Low album, as the effect was sprinkled throughout the record like magic dust.

”It fucks with the fabric of time!”

Tony Visconti about Eventide Harmonizer.

Although Low marks the beginning of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, in practice the album was recorded primarily at the Château d’Hérouville —the same studio where Iggy Pop’s The Idiot had just been completed (although The Idiot, produced by Bowie, was finished before Low, it was released later because Bowie didn’t want it to take too much attention away from his own album). Low, however, was finalized in Berlin at Hansa Studios, right next to the Berlin Wall.

(Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot was significant for Low because Bowie, who produced the album and wrote the songs with Pop, used it as a sort of research laboratory or guinea pig for his new style.)

Low began as an experimental project intended solely to produce demos for a future album, and the fact that the sessions ultimately resulted in a finished album surprised everyone, including Bowie himself.

Low kicks off with “Speed of Life,” a very krautrock-inspired and quite intense instrumental track. Bowie fans had grown accustomed to their idol’s constant transformation. However, it’s easy to imagine that this, Bowie’s first instrumental track, with all its synthetic glitz and driving energy, came as quite a shock to his most pop-oriented fans. And “Breaking Glass,” the very fragmented first vocal track following “Speed of Life,” probably didn’t offer them much consolation either. Bowie sings this track—like the other vocal songs on Low—in a detached and very unemotional style. The vocal performances throughout the album are quite restrained anyway, and overall, Bowie sings very little on Low.

The third track, the intense “What In The World,” is one of the album’s highlights. Its rhythmic, jerky guitar solo brings to mind Robert Fripp, whom the band had originally tried—in vain—to recruit for both The Idiot and Low. Iggy Pop sings backing vocals on the track, and in fact, the song was also originally considered for The Idiot.

The fourth track, “Sound And Vision,” is the one that most closely resembles a standard pop song among the album’s tracks so far. Except that it, too, defies expectations simply in that you have to wait a minute and a half for Bowie’s vocals to kick in. The arrangement of “Sound And Vision” relies heavily on various “futuristic” effects, which was something completely new in 1977. Bowie plays a short saxophone solo on the track, which also appears to be distorted by an Eventide Harmonizer. Contrary to the record label’s pessimistic expectations, the song became a hit, reaching number three in the UK. Globally, however, the song didn’t fare as well, and no other hit singles emerged from Low.

While “Sound And Vision” kept the listener waiting for Bowie’s vocals, the next track, “Always Crashing In The Same Car,” begins right away with them. It’s as if we were jumping right into the middle of a song that had already started. This is, however, a typical effect in Low’s songs in general and yet another way in which the album is reminiscent of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, which is full of similarly vignette-like tracks. “Always Crashing In The Same Car,” which sways irresistibly and effortlessly forward, is punctuated here and there by Davis’s robotically processed drum beats. The song ends with a beautiful, extended, lyrical guitar solo played by Gardiner—one that takes up nearly a third of the song’s total duration—and is somewhat reminiscent of Mike Oldfield’s style.

Side A concludes with “Be My Wife” and “A New Career In A New Town”; “Be My Wife” is the album’s last track to feature regular vocals and represents the album’s most straightforward rock section, with light funk influences. It’s a decent song, but in my opinion, it isn’t among the album’s most inspiring tracks, even though Bowie has often cited it as one of his personal favorites. “A New Career In A New Town” is a somewhat Kraftwerk-esque instrumental track whose structure follows that of a pop song—which is what it was originally intended to be—until Bowie decided (encouraged by Eno) to leave out the vocals entirely. “A New Career In A New Town” serves as a sort of bridge between the experimental pop of Side A and the more avant-garde and abstract instrumentals of Side B.

There’s also a clear difference in mood between Side A and Side B. The pop songs on Side A (let’s just call them that for simplicity’s sake) still seem to draw with neurotic fervor on Bowie’s drug-fueled recent past in Los Angeles, while the chilling moods of Side B are more rooted in his present and reflect the atmosphere of Berlin, its sizzling decadence and history, and, on the other hand, the oppressive atmosphere of the Cold War era with its walls and soldiers.

”They were doing what few other people were trying to do – which was to create an art within the realm of popular music. I listened to it constantly.”

Philip Glass

The hazy and bone-chilling “Warszawa,” which opens Side B, is a captivating track. Its successful blend of a certain kind of almost rhythmless abstractness and, on the other hand, a strong underlying melody has provided a fertile ground for various interpretations. Composer Philip Glass has created an entire symphony (Low Symphony) largely based on “Warszawa,” and drummer Dylan (Steve’s son) Howe has turned the originally six-minute track into an avant-garde jazz arrangement lasting over 11 minutes.

“Warszawa” and “Art Decade” are the tracks on the album where Eno’s influence is most evident. He put the song structures together on his own over the course of a few days while Bowie was handling legal matters with Visconti by his side and the rest of the band had already been sent home. The hazy atmosphere of those songs is clearly reminiscent of Eno’s own music, but Bowie—who was in a fragile emotional and physical state at the time (he was still struggling with a serious cocaine addiction)—injected them with a significantly colder, downright chilling tone. Bowie’s powerful and ingeniously engineered wordless vocalization—in which he channels the Bulgarian choral music he had recently heard—also brings a strong focus to “Warsaw” in particular. Nor can Bowie’s instrumental tracks be called ambient. They aren’t just background noise; rather, they actively demand that the listener… well, listen.

Eno sometimes gets a bit too much credit for the B-side instrumentals, since the album’s closing tracks, “Weeping Wall” and “Subterraneans,” in particular, are very much Bowie’s work. On “Weeping Wall,” Bowie even played all the instruments on the track by himself. Synthesizers and the Chamberline (a keyboard instrument similar to the Mellotron) take center stage on “Weeping Wall,” but Bowie also embellishes the track with guitar, piano, and vibraphone. “Weeping Wall” is the fastest and most energetic of the B-side instrumentals and could be described as a combination of Kraftwerk’s synth-pop and Steve Reich’s minimalism.

The eerie “Subterraneans,” which closes the album, is an even more synthetic track, driven by multiple overlapping layers of synthesizer sounds and Bowie’s wordless, low-pitched vocals (toward the end, words can be heard, though their meaning remains entirely abstract). With its cinematic sound, “Subterraneans” is also a good example of how Low always balances the synthetic and artificial with something natural and organic. In “Subterraneans,” it’s Bowie’s saxophone—sometimes sighing, sometimes buzzing more sharply—and, for example, Eduard Meyer’s cello in “Art Decadence.”

Upon its release, Low divided critics and did not sell nearly as well as Bowie’s previous albums. Over the years, however, the album’s reputation has soared, and its influence on pop music is undeniable. There is little doubt that the music of Joy Division, Gary Numan, Ultravox, or even the more recent Arcade Fire would have sounded very different without the influence of Low.

For me, Low was the first Bowie album that really got me excited, and even though I’ve since come to appreciate the value of his extensive body of work more broadly, I still think Low deserves its place among Bowie’s top three albums.

Bowie’s Berlin trilogy continued just ten months later with the release of the album “Heroes”.

Rating: 5 out of 5.
Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI
Tracks
  1. ”Speed of Life” 2:46
  2. ”Breaking Glass” 1:51
  3. ”What in the World” 2:23
  4. ”Sound and Vision” 3:03
  5. ”Always Crashing in the Same Car” 3:29
  6. ”Be My Wife” 2:55
  7. ”A New Career in a New Town” 2:51
  8. ”Warszawa” Bowie, Brian Eno 6:20
  9. ”Art Decade” 3:43
  10. ”Weeping Wall” 3:26
  11. ”Subterraneans” 5:39
Musicians:

David Bowie: vocals, saxophones (4, 11), guitars (6, 9–11), pump bass (6), harmonica (7), vibraphone (9–10), xylophone (10), ARP synthesizer (1, 10–11), Chamberlin Brian Eno: keyboards: Minimoog (2, 8–9), ARP (3, 11), EMS Synthi AKS (3, 5), piano (7–9, 11), Chamberlin (8–9) Carlos Alomar: rhythm guitar (1, 3–7, 14), lead guitar (1, 2) Dennis Davis: drums, percussion (1–7, 14) George Murray: bass guitar (1–7, 11, 14) Ricky Gardiner: rhythm guitar (2), lead guitar (3–7, 14) Roy Young: piano (1, 3–7, 14), Farfisa organ (3, 5) Iggy Pop: backing vocals (3) Mary Visconti: backing vocals (4, 14) Eduard Meyer: cellos (9 J. Peter Robinson: piano and ARP (11) piano and ARP (11)

Producer: David Bowie, Tony Visconti
Label: RCA

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