Leaving Los Angeles behind
Low is David Bowie’s eleventh album, released in January 1977 through RCA and recorded mostly at the Château d’Hérouville in France before finishing sessions moved to Hansa Studios in Berlin. It followed Bowie’s decision to leave a worsening cocaine addiction and Los Angeles behind by relocating to Europe with his friend Iggy Pop, for whom Bowie had just produced and co-written an album, working out ideas he would carry over into his own next record. Co-produced with Tony Visconti, with contributions from Brian Eno, Low became the first of three albums now known as the Berlin Trilogy, though RCA was so unconvinced by what Bowie delivered that the label sat on the finished tapes for three months before agreeing to release it.
Two sides, two methods
The record splits cleanly into two sides. The first is made of short, direct song-fragments, several cut off before they reach an expected chorus, carrying mostly downbeat lyrics that read as close to Bowie’s own state of mind at the time. The second abandons songs almost entirely for longer instrumental pieces built from synthesizer textures Bowie and Eno developed after hearing Eno’s own ambient records and a cluster of German groups working in a similar vein. Visconti’s most distinctive contribution sits underneath all of it: he ran the drummer’s kit through a pitch-shifting device that gave the drums an unnaturally hard, gated attack that neither Bowie nor Eno had heard applied that way before.
A hit built from instrumental texture
Sound and Vision does the most with the first side’s fragment approach, a hit single built almost entirely from instrumental texture with vocals arriving only well into the track, and it remains the clearest bridge between Low’s two halves. Warszawa, on the second side, achieves something closer to pure mood: a slow, wordless piece built around synthesizer and Bowie’s own invented vocal syllables, named for a visit to the city rather than any specific melody borrowed from it. Between the harmonized drums that drive the first side and the near-ambient calm of the second, the record makes its case less through individual songs than through the sharpness of the contrast between its two halves.
Where the record asks for patience
That same contrast is also where some listeners get off. The instrumental second side asks for patience the first side’s tighter songs do not, and two of its longer pieces develop slowly enough that they can read as texture rather than composition on a first pass. A few of side one’s fragments run barely ninety seconds and feel more like sketches than finished songs, closer to ideas noted down than fully worked through. None of this weakens the record’s overall design, but a listener expecting the more song-based Bowie of earlier albums may find both halves, in different ways, less immediately satisfying than they anticipated.
Withdrawal as subject matter
Low’s underlying idea is that withdrawal itself could be the subject of a record, not just the circumstance behind making one, Bowie had just pulled himself out of Los Angeles and a serious addiction, and the album’s clipped songs and wordless instrumentals both read as a kind of deliberate silence after years of excess. The cover reinforces the point directly: a profile photograph chosen as a visual pun on keeping a low profile after a period of extreme public visibility. Side two’s Berlin pieces extend the same thought outward, treating a divided city recently escaped to as a subject worth documenting in sound rather than through a plot or a lyric.
Who the swerve is for
This is a record for listeners drawn to the edges of pop rather than its centre, anyone interested in where post-punk’s colder textures and post-rock’s instrumental patience both trace back to, or anyone who wants to hear a major pop artist abandon commercial instinct at the height of his commercial power. It will do less for listeners who want the glam theatre of Bowie’s earlier records or a full album of conventional songs; RCA itself doubted the commercial audience for this record, and that doubt was not unreasonable given how far side two departs from anything resembling a single. What would change the verdict is time spent specifically with the instrumentals, heard as a mood piece rather than a song cycle, side two stops feeling like an absence of material and starts feeling like the whole point.
A short record that widened what pop could attempt
Thirty-nine minutes is a small commitment for a record that reshaped what a chart pop artist was allowed to attempt next, and its influence on the drum sounds and cold synthesizer textures of the decade that followed makes the time worth spending almost regardless of taste. The case against is that side two demands more from a listener than side one promises, and anyone hoping the record stays in Sound and Vision’s territory throughout will find the second half a genuine swerve rather than a continuation. Heard as the deliberate two-part statement Bowie and Visconti intended rather than as a collection of potential singles, though, the swerve is the achievement, and the short runtime makes it easy to test that reading for yourself.