David Bowie’s final work of art kicks into motion with an uneasy mixture of electric guitars and flute, a delicately unsettling balance that floats into your ears like an eagle slowly touching down. Before and after his untimely death from cancer, ★ is profound, a flawlessly executed collection of seven songs that summarizes the appeal of David Bowie - his ability to latch onto a mood, a sound, or an image and make it spectacular.
The posthumous album is well-trodden territory in the realm of contemporary music; very often, an artist’s final album will receive heaps of praise, because we only have so many places we can give it. We appreciate these final albums because it is our last glimpse of the artist before they leave us forever, and this line of thinking - although it might warp opinion of an album - can’t be faulted. However, the “pre-humous” ★
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Penultimate track “Dollar Days” ends with thin strings and muscular guitar, ushering in the sleek and dreamy “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, forever to be known as the final David Bowie track. And what a track it is. A gorgeous melody, with an understated bass line and Low’s old harmonica, and Bowie sounds exceptional on top of it. I can’t help but let my sentimentalism get the best of me while listening to this song - Bowie is already far away from us, floating far away in space. “I can’t give everything,” he suddenly yelps, in a perfectly ambiguous way. I can think of a variety of interpretations behind this lyric, but I can’t be certain of any of them. What I can do is marvel at this track and its dreamy clarity, the way it paints Bowie as a man finally floating free, or at least close to the point of departure. Ultimately, ★ spits on the concept of the posthumous album. This is an album about death; not about one’s reaction to death, but how it actually feels to die. It’s an astonishingly beautiful piece of work from David Bowie, a man who died as he