Reviews
 What Happened?
The Lone Sharks
Nine Lives
Steve Winwood
Moneyland
Various Artists
I'm Not There (Original Soundtrack)
Various Artists
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
Toby Keith's 35 BIGGEST Hits
Toby Keith
It's A Shame About Ray (Collector's Edition)
The Lemonheads
About a Son
Otis Blue (Collector's Edition)
Otis Redding
Loaded
Wood Brothers
|
David Bowie
At the time, Pinups appeared to be little more than a quick toss-off, a means of pushing out something fun before digging into the next serious ‘project’. I suppose that it still remains the same even now, only that it has taken on an aura all its own in the past thirty years (my God, has it been that long?). Pinups shows Bowie paying tribute to the bands that had influenced and inspired him while growing up in the sixties. From the perspective of a new millennium, it might be hard to conceive of a time when, like most other English kids, David Bowie was a fan and not a superstar, but he was. In his pre-Ziggy, pre-superstar, pre-pubescent era, he loved Pink Floyd, the Who the Kinks and the Pretty Things like any school-aged English boy would. As it turns out, he was no ordinary schoolboy, and his interpretations of these songs are hardly ordinary, either. Bowie plays with the arrangements of these classic (or semi-classic) compositions, treating them reverently but never resorting to straight cover versions.
Taking a cue from his magnificent remake of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on Aladdin Sane, Bowie brings as much as he borrows. Because of its oddities and idiosyncasies, Syd Barrett’s (of Pink Floyd) “See Emily Play” is not a song that could normally be considered for a cover version, but Bowie does a magnificent job of it, retooling it as a psycho-surreal workout for the fabulously gifted pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar. Other arrangements that transcend expectations are “Friday On My Mind” (with the ‘zoom zoom zoom-zoom-zoom’ backing vocals a la Esquivel) and “Rosalyn”, a rocker that Bowie turns into something resembling psycho-billy.
As for the rest of the album, there are high points (“Sorrow”, “Everything’s Alright”) and moments of mediocrity (“Shapes of Things” “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”, and “I Can’t Explain” don’t offer much that’s new in their interpretation here), but it never gets bland, and it’s never anywhere near bad. At this point, Bowie was cruising high and firing on all cylinders. He was slowly working his way away from the ‘Ziggy’ persona, but Pinups catches Bowie at a time when he and his creation melded naturally, and as such, it is also one of the least pretentious works of Bowie’s career.
Grade: 
 
|
More Music Reviews
More Movie Reviews
More Book Reviews
More Concert Reviews
Powered by Millennium Communications Inc.