Critics read The Next Day’s lyrics to rescue an otherwise flat, unproduced-sounding album.

Evidence

The Next Day’s first single “Where Are We Now?”, with its references to West Berlin era Potsdamer Platz and Nurnberger Strasse, sounded like an object carefully designed to pique the interest not only of the Bowie diehards but also those with a more general stake in pop history and mythology. Berlin! Tony Visconti! The track’s lugubrious melancholy prompted the fantasy that The Next Day could be Bowie’s version of Sinatra’s No One Cares — an old crooner, a man lost in time paradoxically regaining currency by giving up on the sad pursuit of a present that had escaped him for good long ago. But it was a red herring. There are all kinds of intimations of mortality in The Next Day’s words — and reviewers seeking to rescue the record have tended to take refuge in the lyric sheet — but the form is rock, and an alarmingly unprepossessing, devoid of funk (as well as electronics) rock at that. The rest of the album makes the distance between now and (Berlin) then of “Where Are We Now?” painfully evident, a pain heightened by Visconti’s failure to convert this collection of session muso workouts into anything memorable. The Next Day sounds as if it were barely produced at all: it has the flatness of a demo. The relatively warm reception The Next Day received tells its own sad tale about the state of pop in 2013. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1310