David Bowie

David Bowie – Lodger (2017 Remastered Version) (1979/2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 34:58 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

“Lodger” is the 13th studio album by English singer-songwriter David Bowie, the last of the Berlin Trilogy. It was recorded in Switzerland and New York City with collaborator Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti. Unlike Bowie’s previous two albums, Lodger contained no instrumentals and a somewhat more pop-oriented style while experimenting with elements of world music and recording techniques inspired by Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards.

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David Bowie – Let’s Dance (2018 Remaster) (1983/2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 39:50 minutes | 1,49 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

After summing up his maverick tendencies on Scary Monsters, David Bowie aimed for the mainstream with Let’s Dance. Hiring Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers as a co-producer, Bowie created a stylish, synthesized post-disco dance music that was equally informed by classic soul and the emerging new romantic subgenre of new wave, which was ironically heavily inspired by Bowie himself. Let’s Dance comes tearing out of the gate, propulsed by the skittering “Modern Love,” the seductively menacing “China Girl,” and the brittle funk of the title track. All three songs became international hits, and for good reason – they’re catchy, accessible pop songs that have just enough of an alien edge to make them distinctive. However, that careful balance is quickly thrown off by a succession of pleasant but unremarkable plastic soul workouts. “Cat People” and a cover of Metro’s “Criminal World” are relatively strong songs, but the remainder of the album indicates that Bowie was entering a songwriting slump. However, the three hits were enough to make the album a massive hit, and their power hasn’t diminished over the years, even if the rest of the record sounds like an artifact.

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David Bowie – Let’s Dance (2018 Remastered Version) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 39:50 minutes | 884 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

“Let’s Dance” was the fifteenth studio album by David Bowie, originally released in 1983, with co-production by Chic’s Nile Rodgers.

The title track of the album became one of Bowie’s biggest hit singles, reaching No. 1 in the UK, US and various other countries. Further singles included “Modern Love” and “China Girl,” the latter of which was a new version of a song which Bowie had co-written with Iggy Pop for the Pop’s 197 album, ‘The Idiot.’

The success of the album surprised Bowie, who felt he had to continue to pander to the new pop audience he acquired with the album. This led to Bowie releasing two further solo albums in 1984 and 1987 that, despite their relative commercial success, did not sell as well as Let’s Dance, were poorly received by critics at the time and subsequently dismissed by Bowie himself as his “Phil Collins years.”

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David Bowie – I’m Only Dancing (The Soul Tour 74) [Live] (2020/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:26:19 minutes | 1,99 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

Compiled from concert performances in both Detroit and Nashville, these recordings took place during a three-week break from Bowie’s 1974 Diamond Dogs tour. There are premieres here for material from 1975’s Young Americans, and Bowie is backed by the Mike Garson Band augmented by vocalists such Luther Vandross and Warren Peace.

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David Bowie – Heroes (1977/2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 40:44 minutes | 1,57 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

“Heroes” is the twelfth studio album by English musician David Bowie and the second installment of his “Berlin Trilogy”. Recorded with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, “Heroes” continued the ambient experiments and featured the contributions of guitarist Robert Fripp.

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David Bowie – Glastonbury 2000 (Live) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:54:22 minutes | 1,42 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

Bowie first stepped onto the Glastonbury stage in 1971. “As of 1990 I got through the rest of the 20th century without having to do a big hits show. Yes, yes I know I did four or five hits on the later shows but I held out pretty well I thought…big, well-known songs will litter the field at Glastonbury this year. Well, with a couple of quirks of course”, David Bowie wrote at the time. In the year 2000, the Thin White Duke made an unforgettable impression on the UK’s largest music festival. Indeed, his set-list comprising of 21 tracks is a testament to the extent of his legacy. It includes the favourites: Starman, China Girl, Heroes, The Man Who Sold The World, Let’s Dance, Life On Mars?, Changes, Under Pressure, but also some quirkier gems:Stay, Golden Years, Wild Is The Wind, and the leading track from Station to Station(1975), the unusual, melancholic album that Lester Bangs considered to be his masterpiece.  Performing on stage with his long mane of hair, his ¾ Alexander McQueen coat and his XXL charisma, Bowie is on fire. He is joined by guitarist Earl Slick who replaced Mick Ronson when the Spiders From Mars broke up in 1974 and who at the time was the mastermind behind Diamond Dogs and David Live, Bowie’s first live recording. A true wonder to behold.  – Charlotte Saintoin

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David Bowie – Glass Spider (Live Montreal ’87) [2018 Remaster] (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 02:04:59 minutes | 4,70 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour in 1987 rates among the most divisive outings of his entire career, on the one hand standing as a return to the vast theatrical ventures that characterized his early- to mid-’70s concerts, but on the other symbolizing the absolute waste of resources and talent that many critics considered his 1980s output to be. Certainly there was little in the reception to that year’s Never Let Me Down album to suggest that his public was even remotely interested in a Broadway-style extravaganza built around the LP’s songs, with Bowie’s own apparent reluctance to revisit the icons of his most sacred past serving as a deterrent to even the most indulgent fans. Of the 20 songs featured on the Glass Spider live DVD, themselves a very representative sampling of his entire period repertoire, no less than ten were drawn from his last three albums — that is, Let’s Dance, Tonight, and Never Let Me Down itself. The crucial Hunky Dory/Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane sequence, on the other hand, served up just two, “Jean Genie” and, peculiarly, “Time.” Add to that crime the sheer magnitude of a stage set that saw Bowie himself positively dwarfed behind grandstanding dancers, overactive musicians, and a monstrous fiberglass spider, and it is not difficult to comprehend why the man’s supporters still smirk and look self-consciously away whenever the affair is mentioned. All of which means you have no way of anticipating the sheer brilliance of this DVD. The lack of extras is disappointing — a few pages of biographical text are the only tangible “bonus.” But the feature itself is spellbinding. Filmed in Sydney during the Australian leg of the tour, it captures the band from a vantage point that most fans simply never got to experience — perfect sound, spot-on choreography, and excellent viewing angles. The narration that linked many of the songs, and was either lost or intelligible at the actual shows, is as clear as Bowie himself intended it to be, and the tight shots of the individual musicians and dancers ensures that not a moment of the action is conducted out of sight. The ensemble introduction to “Fashion” is exhilarating (if a shade preposterous), while the opening of the show itself, with guitarist Carlos Alomar very visually defying the bellowed shrieks of an invisible Bowie, has a wild charm that suggests, if he ever gets bored with guitar-picking, he’s got a solid future in silent movies. The spider itself is mesmerizing, the most unexpectedly compulsive on-stage prop in modern rock since the Rolling Stones took an outsized phallus on the road with them. The musical performances, too, are a lot more powerful than reputation insists — without exception, the live rearrangements are stunning, with a handful of songs (an unexpected “Sons of the Silent Age,” a violent “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and a heartfelt “Absolute Beginners”) actually competing with their studio incarnations in terms of dynamic and drive. Indeed, the deeper one delves into the performance, the stronger the conviction that, if Bowie had released Glass Spider on CD, instead of hiding it away on VHS alone, history might well have rehabilitated the album around the same time as it began to forgive him the rest of his 1980s sins. – Dave Thompson

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David Bowie – Glass Spider (Live Montreal ’87, 2018 Remastered Version) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:05:10 minutes | 2,77 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

David Bowie, live from the Olympic Stadium, Montreal, Canada on August 30th 1987 Strung out in heaven s high, the eternal lost astronaut walked out on to the stage at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal and gave an inspired joyride through his then 20-album career. 1987 s Glass Spider tour was his most theatrically ambitious to date and although it had its critics as a spectacle, musically, it was spellbinding. While Low, Lodger and Ziggy fail to emerge, Bowie has plenty more to play with, even after his highly successful Serious Moonlight tour. Here is Bowie, back at his beguiling best in front of 80,000 ecstatic fans.

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David Bowie – Five Years 1969-1973 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 04:03:21 minutes | 4,91 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone Records, Warner Music

The musical chameleon’s 6 studio albums from 1969-1973. In just a short amount of time you can see Bowie turn and surprise at each album. The accompanying book features technical notes about each album from the producers Tony Visconti and Ken Scott, an original press review for each album and a short foreword by an artist of note. Albums included: David Bowie (aka Space Oddity), The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups.

The first in a series of career-spanning comprehensive box sets, Five Years 1969-1973 chronicles the beginning of David Bowie’s legend by boxing all of his officially released music during those early years. This amounts to six studio albums — 1969’s David Bowie (aka Space Oddity); 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World; 1971’s Hunky Dory; 1972’s The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars; Aladdin Sane, and Pin Ups (both from 1973); a pair of live albums (Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture Soundtrack and Live in Santa Monica ’72, both released long after these five years) and a two-CD collection of non-LP tracks called Re:Call, plus Ken Scott’s 2003 mix of Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust. That list suggests how “officially released” is a guideline that’s easily bent. Live in Santa Monica ’72 is a bootleg that became canonical in 1995, and the soundtrack to Ziggy Stardust didn’t appear until 1983, but both are welcome because they either showcase the Spiders from Mars at their prime (Santa Monica) or at their end (Ziggy). Considering the number of edits, alternates, and B-sides Bowie released during this period, Re:Call is also a needed supplement, but it has some willful blind spots due to that “officially released” maxim: namely, any outtake released as a bonus on the Rykodisc reissues of the early ’90s, including such major items as “Lightning Frightening,” “Bombers,” and “Sweet Head.” Such absences are an irritant but not a major one because the box itself is quite handsome — whether in its CD or LP incarnation, each record is packaged as a replica of its original release — and the remastering is excellent, with Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, and Pin Ups given upgrades to match the anniversary remasters of Ziggy and Aladdin Sane from the 2010s. The improved audio alone makes Five Years 1969-1973 a desirable box for serious Bowie fans, but the whole set does justice to one of the great creative runs in rock history.

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David Bowie – Diamond Dogs (1974/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 38:33 minutes | 1,43 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

David Bowie’s 1974 concept album remastered. Diamond Dogs was Bowie’s eighth studio album and features singles “Rebel Rebel,” “Diamond Dogs,” and “1984.”

Diamond Dogs is a concept album by David Bowie, originally released by RCA Records in 1974. Thematically it was a marriage of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Bowie’s own glam-tinged vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Bowie had wanted to make a theatrical production of Orwell’s book and began writing material after completing sessions for his 1973 album Pin Ups, but the late author’s estate denied the rights. The songs wound up on the second half of Diamond Dogs instead where, as the titles indicate, the Nineteen Eighty-Four theme was prominent.

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David Bowie – David Live (2005 Mix) [Remastered Version] (1974/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:42:50 minutes | 1,98 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rhino

David Live is the first official live album by English musician David Bowie, originally released by RCA Records in 1974. The album was recorded in July of that year, on the initial leg of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Tour, at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. The second leg, a more soul-oriented affair following recording sessions in Philadelphia for the bulk of Young Americans, would be renamed ‘Philly Dogs’, as reflected on a different live release, Cracked Actor (2017).

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David Bowie – David Bowie (aka Space Oddity) (1969/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 46:19 minutes | 1,88 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

When David Bowie’s second album appeared in late 1969, he was riding high. His first ever hit single, the super-topical “Space Oddity,” had scored on the back of the moon landing that summer, and so distinctive an air did it possess that, for a moment, its maker really did seem capable of soaring as high as Major Tom. Sadly, it was not to be. “Space Oddity” aside, Bowie possessed very little in the way of commercial songs, and the ensuing album (his second) emerged as a dense, even rambling, excursion through the folky strains that were the last glimmering of British psychedelia. Indeed, the album’s most crucial cut, the lengthy “Cygnet Committee,” was nothing less than a discourse on the death of hippiness, shot through with such bitterness and bile that it remains one of Bowie’s all-time most important numbers – not to mention his most prescient. The verse that unknowingly name-checks both the Sex Pistols (“the guns of love”) and the Damned is nothing if not a distillation of everything that brought punk to its knees a full nine years later. The remainder of the album struggles to match the sheer vivacity of “Cygnet Committee,” although “Unwashed and Slightly Dazed” comes close to packing a disheveled rock punch, all the more so as it bleeds into a half minute or so of Bowie wailing “Don’t Sit Down” – an element that, mystifyingly, was hacked from the 1972 reissue of the album. “Janine” and “An Occasional Dream” are pure ’60s balladry, and “God Knows I’m Good” takes a well-meant but somewhat clumsy stab at social comment. Two final tracks, however, can be said to pinpoint elements of Bowie’s own future. The folk epic “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud” (substantially reworked from the B-side of the hit) would remain in Bowie’s live set until as late as 1973, while a re-recorded version of the mantric “Memory of a Free Festival” would become a single the following year, and marked Bowie’s first studio collaboration with guitarist Mick Ronson. The album itself however, proved another dead end in a career that was gradually piling up an awful lot of such things.

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David Bowie – Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74) (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:37:03 minutes | 2,04 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

Finally officially released 20-track live performance from Los Angeles in September 1974, including two songs tracks not on the “David Live” album. Recorded in-between the “Diamond Dogs” and “Philly Dogs” tours.

Driven by an entirely deeper dynamic than most pop artists, David Bowie inhabited a very special world of extraordinary sounds and endless vision. Unwilling to stay on the treadmill of rock legend and avoiding the descent into ever demeaning and decreasing circles of cliché, Bowie wrote and performed what he wanted, when he wanted. His absence from the endless list of “important events” has just fuelled interest. Constant speculation about what the guy was up to has even led some to wonder if this is his greatest reinvention ever.

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David Bowie – Changestwobowie (1981/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 42:42 minutes | 1,63 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

Changestwobowie is a David Bowie compilation album issued in 1981 by RCA Records. Its title and packaging followed the format of RCA’s earlier Bowie compilation, Changesonebowie released in 1976. As well as post-1976 singles, the album collected songs from earlier in Bowie’s career that had not appeared on Changesone. However it did not repeat the chart success of the earlier compilation, reaching No. 24 on the UK Album Chart and No. 68 in the United States. The album was briefly available on CD from 1985 but was soon deleted, along with most of his other RCA albums, owing to a conflict between Bowie and the label. The album was not reissued when Rykodisc obtained the rights to re-release the Bowie catalog in 1990, opting to merge the two compilations into one instead.

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David Bowie – Changestwobowie (1981/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 42:42 minutes | 837 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone UK

Changestwobowie is a David Bowie compilation album issued in 1981 by RCA Records. Its title and packaging followed the format of RCA’s earlier Bowie compilation, Changesonebowie released in 1976. As well as post-1976 singles, the album collected songs from earlier in Bowie’s career that had not appeared on Changesone. However it did not repeat the chart success of the earlier compilation, reaching No. 24 on the UK Album Chart and No. 68 in the United States. The album was briefly available on CD from 1985 but was soon deleted, along with most of his other RCA albums, owing to a conflict between Bowie and the label. The album was not reissued when Rykodisc obtained the rights to re-release the Bowie catalog in 1990, opting to merge the two compilations into one instead.

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