Review Summary: Let down
The 80’s was definitely not the best decade for David Bowie, although he released the very good Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) at the start of it he ended up falling deep into a pit of mediocrity. Let’s Dance showed a change in Bowie’s sound, it became simpler and more radio friendly and the album sold very well due to that even though it was not nearly of the same quality as his earlier work, Let’s Dance was not a great album really, but it was listenable and some songs such as Under Pressure, China Girl and the title track where quite enjoyable, but the same cannot be really said about the two duds he released after it. Tonight was released a year after Let’s Dance and it was pretty disappointing as the album sounded lazy and tired, but three years later he released his worst and least enjoyable album by far: Never Let Me Down.
Never Let Me Down is a horribly lazy and forgettable album, most of the songs end up just becoming a mindless drone of bland, predictable and tired sounding music. Most of the songs are not even worth talking about or listening to as they just blend together into one large mass of over production. There are a few jewels buried in this mass however, such as Time Will Crawl which features some nice sax playing and is one of the better songs lyrically on this album, Day-In Day-Out despite having an incredibly cheesy 80’s sound instrumentally is at least is somewhat catchy and sounds like Bowie put some effort into it. Despite these few decent glimmers of hope, the rest of the album just mechanically drones on deep into mediocrity and laziness. The songs sound like Bowie put zero thought or passion into them and the instrumentation sounds lifeless, stale and robotic.
The thing that really makes David Bowie great is how unique he is, most of albums stand out because he just injects his uniqueness and great talent deep into them to create something special, this album, however, completely lacks any of that. It’s not the worst album to ever be put out by a great artist, but it’s definitely a horribly disappointing and forgettable one. Some of the songs might be worth a listen if you are a huge Bowie fan, but for the most part avoid this album like its a horrible disease, there is pretty much no good reason to buy this album unless you are collecting every single Bowie album or are collecting albums with awful cover art or something, but don’t get this album to listen to, it’s defiantly a let down.
