‘Earthling’ by David Bowie

Throughout the nineties, Bowie released five solo albums, a slower work rate than his seventies peak, put an impressive tally for an artist so far into his career. ‘Earthling’ was the fourth album of the decade. It sits slightly awkwardly between the more ambitious and experimental ‘Outside’ and the back to basics approach of ‘Hours’. As a result, it tends to be somewhat dismissed, though on its release it had a reasonably warm reception.

‘Earthling’ is often referred to as Bowie’s drum and bass album, and this is fair to a degree. Certainly the album has one foot firmly planted in the world of dance. There is an awful lot of fast, programmed percussion throughout Earthling, and the album received a certain amount of criticism for jumping the bandwagon. This criticism is, I think, unfair on two counts. For a start, drum and bass was never really a dominant genre outside the world of the music press – Bowie’s flirtation with it was never going to be an over-populist gimmick, so he deserves credit for it on that basis. Secondly, despite the rhythmic dominance of the record, the quality of song writing is never sacrificed. In fact, there are some excellent songs on ‘Earthling’, comparable to the number on ‘Outside’, but without so much of the filler. ‘Little Wonder’, ‘Battle For Britain’, ‘Dead Man Walking’ and ‘Seven Years In Tibet’ could have all been stripped of their programming, and still worked. ‘Earthling’ also contains a number of musical flourishes from Bowie’s own history, demonstrating an increasing awareness and willingness to plunder his own roots – ‘Dead Man Walking’ is built around the same riff as ‘The Supermen’, Mike Garson’s piano outro to ‘Battle For Britain’ could have come from ‘Aladdin Sane’, and Bowie’s cockney vocals on ‘Little Wonder’ could have been recorded at the end of the sixties. Amongst these familiar touches are lots of new things – ‘Satellites’ and ‘Telling Lies’ are both pretty different from anything he’d previously recorded, and ‘Law’ is virtually unrecognisable as Bowie (and perhaps, therefore, not the best choice for a closing track).

All in all, it’s a fine album in its own right, and more than a decade on, it looks increasingly likely that it’ll remain as Bowie’s final new direction. The three albums he’s released so far have been good, or great – better than this, maybe – but all of them have been comparatively safe. It’s very unlikely he’ll do something like this again.