I mentioned in my comments on Ziggy Stardust that I thought Aladdin Sane might be the better album; having returned to it, I’d put them on par, overall.
This album goes harder on the glam rock,
with the big single, Jean Genie, indicative of the kind of hard stomp that also
features in tracks like Cracked Actor and Watch That Man. Elsewhere Bowie goes
for a kind of hard Bo Diddley beat, with Panic In Detroit, or a glammier
version of the Stones’ Let’s Spend The Night Together.
With Mick Ronson’s chugging guitar, these
are all pretty solid tracks, but it’s when he steps outside this genre that the
album really takes it to another level. Drive-In Saturday always reminds me of
Five Years on the Ziggy Stardust album, with its doo-wop Fifties feel, a song about far future people
watching old films to get a sense of sensuality in a sterile world. Time,
meanwhile, is a bit of vaudevillain camp with the infamous lyric "Time, he flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor".
This album features Mike Garson on piano,
and for me the best tracks are where he gets unleashed – his absolutely
glorious bit of free-form chaos on Aladdin Sane, as the rest of the Spiders
give a steady underlying groove, while the album closer Lady Grinning Soul (possibly
my favourite Bowie track of them all?) is a bit less totally free-form, echoing
something like Liszt, with Garson, Ronson, Bowie and Ken Fordham’s saxophone
all swirling up into space at the end, presumably taking Ziggy away to his home
planet.
In terms of *cleverness* of composition,
and musicianship, I’d say that this one does have the edge on Ziggy Stardust.
There’s less of a narrative through-line, although I’ve always felt that this
is meant to be the kind of music Ziggy is playing to save the Earth on the previous
album, both familiar and otherworldy at the same time. Just as I think I’m going to have to see Dark
Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here as two halves of the same coin, I think
that this album and Ziggy Stardust are the same. You can’t have one without the
other.
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