1. OUTSIDE

OUTSIDE CONTROL?

The guys who created the great Low (a masterpiece) are back together. Brian Eno joined forces with David again and expectations were high.

Fans got a preview of the album under the release of the single "The Hearts Filthy Lesson". An apocalyptical story promoted by a weird (but artistically excessively well crafted and original) video. So weird that several scenes were edited to fit into the MTV canons.

The video is highly recommended for its strong images but the song as such is not a memorable one. It failed to chart (within David's standards) and clearly indicated that the man was going to surprise its fan database with the upcoming album.

And so did he.

David said: "Nobody would take Outside when we first recorded it. It was held back for a year until we could find somebody to distribute it in America and by that time my enthusiasm was pretty thin on the ground". No comment.

"Outside" which subtitle is "The Diary of Nathan Adler or The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue. A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle" (ouch!) is David's most hermetic and experimental album so far.

Electronic, house, techno: you name it. The concept of the album doesn't help to like it either. David wrote a storyboard featuring not one, but several characters. Professor Adler (a detective and main character), Baby Grace Blue (the dissected young girl), Leon Blank (a twenty two years old delinquent), Algeria Touchshriek (a seventy eight years old man) and Ramona Stone (the art terrorist). Each one being the main character of one or more songs.

The tracks I can live with are not many: "Outside", a traditional Bowie song, "I'm Deranged", "Motel" (the second part of the song only), "No Control" and "Strangers When We Met". The last one being my fave. It was actually written during the "Buddha" sessions. It was released as a single but also failed to chart reasonably.

Another characteristics of this album, is that during several tracks one has the impression to revive some old experience. If you feel that way too, don't look further. It's due to Mike Garson and his fantastic piano play on "Aladin Sane" back to .1973.

If this project is called "1. Ouside" it is because there were supposedly another two (or even more) albums to be released from these "Outside" sessions, which comprise in total about twenty-five hours of music. At different times, David mentioned that they would see the light, at others that both Eno and himself didn't have the time to go through the existing material.

There is a lot of hype about a follow-up (2. Contamination). In February 2000, to the question: "What is the one thing your most looking forward to this year? David answered:

"1. Going back into the studio with Tony Visconti (which he will do a little later with Heaten) , 2. Would like to start some rerecording of lots of the songs I wrote in the 60's (which he partially did) and 3. Trying to piece together '2. Contamination' the follow up to Outside".

There was also a plan to produce a rock opera from the "Outside" project. But it never saw the light either. Gérard Mortier, a Belgian who is Director of the Salzburg Festival wanted to produce this but after several discussions he came to the conclusion: "Even my good friend Bianca Jagger tried to negotiate but it seemed to be impossible to get Bowie to work for me for three weeks, even for half a million dollars. End of the story.

There was even once mentioned that the third leg would be called "3. Afrikaan". At the current pace of things, I guess that it will be released in 2412 or so. As far as I'm concerned I'm not too in a hurry to see this happening. I have never been able to enter into this new David adventure.

It is also the start of a frenetic remix disease almost doubling each individual album David was releasing form "Outside" onwards. All these remixes, together with the original albums are comprised in a ten CD set simply called "Bowie Box Set".

Two stars for "Outside". Just outside my reach.

"A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle"

"Not tomorrow, yesterday," A grand plan that never materialized.

Though I knew the name of David Bowie for a while, this was the first album of his I actually added to my collection (had a copy of Heroes LP on cassette from a while back) This was the one that really got me interested in the rest of his works. I had become acquainted with Heroes a few years back only and never took an interest in exploring the rest until hearing this one. This one hooked me enough to have try out all his future releases whenever as they come out. The main draw for me - Eno's prominent role. Being a concept album didn't hurt either. It was supposed to be a grand concept with this the first installment of a series of concept albums, which for better and/or worse never materialized, hence the official title on the album: 1. Outside.

There was a music movement called industrial, that was by some, at the time, epitomized by Nine Inch Nails, and no doubt Bowie was influenced by it. Since I was just getting into NIN, this album really clicked with me, and it still does. Might expand your boundaries a little, too...

While Bowie had made a career out of genre-hopping and fairly unpredictable twists, it had been a little while (aside from the Tin Machine detour, though I don't think that career move was as abnormal as people made it out to be) since he'd made an album that totally came out of left field. It was one thing for him to collaborate with Brian Eno for the first time in more than fifteen years: it was quite something else to make what's essentially a 90's version of Diamond Dogs. This, unfortunately, is a case where a concept album is done a major disservice by the concept, centered around a fairly incoherent story Bowie wrote in the liner notes related to the end of the century (one of the obvious parallels with Diamond Dogs is that both albums were largely centered around a specific year: 1984 for DD, 1999 for this). The album is littered with "segue" tracks (and they take up more time than you'd think in aggregate) that highlight different characters in Bowie's tale, and they're as obnoxious and as disruptive to the album's flow as possible without making any coherent sense. This is one of the worst presentations of a concept album's concept I've ever come across; it kinda reminds me of the Peter Gabriel album OVO from a few years later, but at least Peter had the good sense to put everything explicitly related to that album's concept into the opening track, thus containing the badness in one place. Ideally, I wish somebody had been able to persuade Bowie to strip out the album's concept completely, but I guess the story meant something to him, so no dice.

Once I disregard the conceptual aspects of the album, though, I find it rather enjoyable. The album's two most notable aspects on the music side are (a) the aforementioned reunion with Brian Eno and (b) Bowie's embracing of "industrial" music in his latest attempt to stay relevant and hip. Well, sort of; only a small number of tracks come close to industrial, but the album was promoted in such a way as to emphasize them, so it's hard to ignore them. I actually think, based on this album, that industrial suits Bowie rather well; after all, Bowie had always shown a talent for making music that's both ugly and attractive, and both the dancable single "Hearts Filthy Lesson" (I don't know why there's no apostrophe) and the noisy "Hallo Spaceboy" entertain me plenty. I can't remember more than a little bit of each of them, but every time I listen to them I find myself sucked in (especially when some of the noisier guitar lines in "Spaceboy" appear), and that counts for something.

The rest of the album is more Bowie and Eno (who makes his presence known through his various "treatments" and little tricks like "spooky" piano lines popping up pretty frequently) than Trent Reznor, and it follows a similar pattern of songs that have interesting moments when on but don't really leave a significant lasting impression (other than, "hey, I remember kinda liking that when it was playing"). Aside from a remake of "Strangers When We Meet" to close the album (except that the reissue contains a decent upbeat single called "Get Real"), only a couple of tracks really stand tall on their own. The first is the title track (immediately following the brief opener, "Leon Takes Us Outside"), which establishes the album's stylized melancholy by combining tasteful synth and guitar parts with lyrics centered around two phrases: "Now not tomorrow/it's happening now/not tomorrow" and "The music is outside/it's happening outside." The second is "The Motel," a largely directionless ballad that's nonetheless able to get by just fine on atmosphere, especially in the "chorus" that says "There is no hell/there is no shame/there is no hell/like an old hell/there is no hell." It's powerful stuff, no question about it.

Elsewhere, I definitely like the upbeat (relatively) "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town" (what does it say when one of the happiest songs on an album is centered on the phrase, "All's well, twentieth century dies?") and "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)" has a rather attractive guitar line that could have made for a best-song-candidate if paired with a better vocal melody. And ... uh ... well, I remember liking "No Control" a good amount, and the "tellllllll the truth/tellllllll the truth/we prick you we prick you we prick you" chorus of "We Prick You" is definitely a memorable moment. Going through individual songs, though, is rather pointless; the album works far better in aggregate ... which is what makes the segue tracks all the more aggravating, but let's not focus on that. Every time I listen to this album, I find myself glad that I listened to something that entertained me in the past while, but it's frustrating to have little idea why once I'm finished. Still entertainment is entertainment, and a concept-free version of this album (reduced to about 55 minutes from 75) would get a higher grade. Anybody interested in 90's Bowie should start with Buddha of Suburbia, but this should be stop number two. I'm kinda glad the planned sequel (2. Contamination) never happened, though.

Bowie and Eno get back together and fiddle about with a Nine Inch Nails aesthetic applied to an electronic dance-rock presentation that takes the experiments of Black Tie White Noise and The Buddha of Suburbia into dark new territory.

On paper, the idea of 1. Outside - and the two proposed sequels that never appeared, 2. Contamination and 3. Afrikaan - sounds amazing. A trilogy, just like the Berlin albums, only this time they're linked narrative concept albums. Not only that, but a murder mystery too! And not just a murder mystery, but a post-modern post-cyberpunk New Weird tale about a detective tracking down a serial killer murdering people in the name of art in a world where such brutality has become so cliche there are entire police departments devoted to investigating such crimes! And Bowie uses different voices for all the characters! And it's all improvised in the studio!

Well, yeah, there's the problem. Bowie and Eno had an ambitious plan for these albums, but didn't really back it up with sufficient compositional planning; instead, the music here is cobbled together from hours and hours of improv sessions. This attempt to create developed songs from recontextualised improvisations isn't unprecedented in Eno's own work - and indeed Frank Zappa did it a lot with his "xenochrony" technique - but in this case the results don't quite hit the level of the classic Berlin trilogy. You could get one good album out of this stuff - Outside itself - but the fact that Contamination and Afrikaan were never completed says it all.

On top of that, the attempt to latch onto a modern industrial rock sound can feel half-hearted if you are expecting this to be the sort of Bowie take on Nine Inch Nails which the aesthetic presentation suggests. It's somewhat less jarring if you have digested the Bowie albums led up to it, though, which it is a fairly impressive development of.

Still, the fact is that the best song on here, I'm Deranged, works much better in the context of NIN main man Trent Reznor's soundtrack selection for the David Lynch movie Lost Highway, in which judicious editing transforms it into a powerful bookending piece.