Monday, July 4, 2011

Black Tie White NoiseI know I've blogged about Black Tie White Noise before and that I've probably sang its praise once too often, but it's another rare album where I like every single song on it. It's so beautiful and sad and energetic and mysterious.

Surely one of his most underrated works ever, Black Tie White Noise may just have been a victim of bad timing. It came out shortly after Bowie's Tin Machine debacle (if you can call it that) and many hardcore fans with grudges were still thinking Bowie had sold out with the commercially successful Let's Dance (even if the title track is one of the most haunting upbeat dance songs ever).

"The Wedding" and "The Wedding Song" are so incredibly full of emotion, which comes as no surprise if you know that Bowie wrote it shortly after his wedding to super model Iman. "Pallas Athena" is both ominous (with its thunderous repetition of "God is on top of this") and pleasingly moving as a dance tune.

"Miracle Goodnight" and "Don't Let Me Down and Down" are lighter fare (in comparison with the rest of the material) but are so sincere in their plea for things to get better they are irresistible to anyone with a heartbeat. (On a side note of trivia, Bowie recorded the latter song in Indonesian.)

But whenever I listen to Black Tie White Noise it's always "The Wedding Song" that I return to...it's so earnest and beautiful and (just as I thought with the hit single "Let's Dance") oddly romantic and even kind of sensual...in that sensual kind of way only Bowie is capable of creating.

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