TONIGHT

In between two of his best albums, Scary Monsters (1980) and Black Tie White Noise (1993), David Bowie put out a series of dissapointing and lackluster albums. Tonight is one of those albums, and quite possibly the most lackluster of the bunch. This is a pretty uneven effort that has at least one great song, a couple that are OK and plenty that are awful.

The one good song on here, Loving the Alien, is classic Bowie in that it packs an album's side worth of material into a mini-epic seven minute artsy pop-rock song. This song holds up well against any material from his golden age of creativity (late 70s). Suprisingly, the next best thing on here are the two reggae songs. Usually reggae played by rock bands is unlistenable, but David has a pretty good understanding of the subtle nuances of this music. His fake Jamaican vocal styles are also suprisingly good and not embarrassing at all. Don't Look Down in particular is nice with Bowie combining his art-rock tendencies with the reggae style.

Unfortunately everything else on here is mediocre to bad. Neighborhood Threat is a tedious 80s style rocker made for AOR FM radio and Blue Jean brings back David's insincere old-school good times RnB style that made so much money for him on Let's Dance. For the rest of the album you get two 80s style cheezy world beat rip-offs that just need an over-sized suit and they would be David Byrne, plus two poorly performed covers. It's hard to believe Bowie could screw up a song like Brian Wilson's God Only Knows. This song is so perfect in the first place all you have to do is get out of the way and let the song work it's magic, somehow instead it becomes a jumbled mess that finally gets on track at the end for some nice dramatic vocalizing.

If you really must own everything Bowie has done then there are one or two songs on here that are worth hearing, otherwise there are so many albums he is has done that are so much better.