206. David Bowie, "Low"

 

If you're having a problem with cocaine (and it's the mid-70's and you live in LA and you're famous) and you need to clean up, David Bowie has the plan for you: move to France with Iggy Pop and record an album.  Sounds counterintuitive, but hey, worked for him!  Although this album is known as the first in the "Berlin trilogy," it was mostly recorded at the Château d'Hérouville in France, which is coincidentally where I like to record my albums too.  Bowie was such a fucking monster that he wrote all the music for Iggy's The Idiot and recorded that first, then went ahead and pumped this out.  This was his 11th album!  And it came out in 1977!

Bowie was of course one of the most eccentric and sui generis musicians of modern music, but this is weird even by his standards.  The first song, "Speed of Life," is an instrumental which is kind of a shame, really, because I can just imagine an awesome Bowie vocal on it.  A lot of the songs seem like ideas rather than fully completed artifacts but holy shit they are very good ideas.  There are skittery guitars and Brian Eno's weird electronic shit in tension if not outright conflict, but it works.

And then there's the drum sound.  It's not often that a single album launches a discrete drum sound that's so widely revered and imitated that it becomes famous, but that's what producer Tony Viscionti got here.  He used the first widely available pitch-shifter, the Eventide H910 Harmonizer, which could change the pitch of a sound without changing the speed, to make a heretofore unheard drum sound.  You can really hear it in the beginning of track 2, "Breaking Glass":

Great song, too.  I mean, obviously there are great songs on here, it's a Bowie album, but I had forgotten all about this album.  It doesn't have any "hits" and it's not particularly catchy or hooky, but it's so fucking cool and wild that it makes up for it.  Side 2 is mostly instrumental, with some vocals that aren't singing anything but are instruments themselves.  Side 1 obviously influenced a ton of post-punk bands like Joy Division and Gang of Four, and you can see the early stirrings of ambient and chill music in Side 2.  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Oh yeah.