LOW

| David Bowie

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LOW

Low is the 11th studio album by English musician David Bowie, released on RCA Records on 14 January 1977. Recorded following Bowie's move to West Berlin after a period of drug addiction and personal instability, Low became the first of three collaborations with musician Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti, later termed the "Berlin Trilogy". The album was in fact recorded largely in France, and marked a shift in Bowie's musical style toward an electronic approach that would be further explored on subsequent albums "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979). Though it was initially met with mixed critical reviews, Low has since become widely acclaimed as one of Bowie's best and most influential works. Pitchfork placed it at number 1 in its list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1970s, while Q placed it at number 14 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2013, NME listed the album as the 14th greatest of all time. It was also listed as one of Rolling Stone's 500 greatest albums of all time. - Wikipedia

Critic Reviews

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  • pitchfork

    The first album in David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy sees Bowie as a tragic figure. The album's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed, while the blank, instrumental second side feels like a calculated attempt to kill the author.  

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  • APHORISTIC ALBUM REVIEWS

    Low stands as the pinnacle of Bowie’s trail-blazing – he’s making music that informed post-punk, still several years away, and it sounds only fractionally dated almost forty years later.  

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  • John Mcferrin

    Overall, I'll never quite adore this album, but I still think it's extremely nice, and I'm happy to listen to it from time to time. Don't get it before the albums that bookend it, though. 

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  • Only Solitaire

    Bowie goes experimental - this album saved him from dinosaurism problems, and deservedly so.  

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  • Adrian Denning

    The music that is here is wonderfully put together. So, yes sirs, 'Low' is indeed a winner in our house.  

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  • Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews

    At first listen I thought they were formless and sluggish, but despite their maximal avant garde quotient they're actually cleverly composed, precisely executed, and creepily operatic ("Warszawa/Art Decade/Weeping Wall/Subterraneans"). The record is one of Bowie's most daring experimental efforts, but it's not for everyone - his American fans, at least, were not amused, and Bowie's US record sales plummeted until Let's Dance.  

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  • Don Ignacio

    Low was an influential album, too, and it once again thrust Bowie onto the forefront of pop-music evolution.  

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  • Medium

    The beginning of the Berlin Trilogy. It’s a critical darling for good reason. After years of making “tunes”, he’s moved toward making sounds and leaning on the avant garde. 

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  • Mark Prindle

    new wavey-ish collection of Devo-style stilted jaunty guitar pop songs with weird bubbling, shrieking and pippity-poppy synth noises layered on top. An interesting sound definitely, with a very active lead guitar fighting for prominence against ridiculous artificial noises that keep popping in and out ("What In The World" has a HILARIOUS synth effect - it sounds like somebody is playing Pac-Man in the recording studio!  

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  • BBC

    Self-destruction is carried through the album by the icy, mannered vocals. 

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  • RollingStone

    Low is the sound of the slinky vagabond falling to earth, trying to catch up with the speed of life — and maybe even find some kind of home there.  

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  • ALL MUSIC

    Low is a dense, challenging album that confirmed his place at rock's cutting edge.  

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  • Classic Rock Review

    The result would be one of the most critically acclaimed albums of Bowie’s long career. 

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  • The Irish Times

    This Album Changed My Life. 

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  • sputnik music

    "Low" is Bowie at the top of his game.  

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  • PUNKNEWS.ORG

    Low is a dynamic record, one that lends itself to different moods.  

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  • The Escapist Magazine

    this album unique.  

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  • POST-PUNK.com

    The album represents a stark contrast from the bombast and excess of Bowie’s career to date, featuring an A-side of paranoid pop gems and a B-side of deliciously moving instrumentals and mood pieces.  

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  • TV Tropes

    Low, along with the rest of Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy", was a major influence on Post-Punk and Post-Rock. The album is best remembered for the Top 10 hit "Sound and Vision". 

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  • Fading Music

    Low is without a doubt one of the most groundbreaking album of its time, and it made it very clear where Trent Reznor draws his inspiration from.  

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  • Probably Just hungry

    Low is regarded as a highly-influential album in a similarly understated way. (So understated, in fact, that many people forget about its existence in lieu of Bowie’s more outrageous works. 

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  • Robert Christgau

    I find side one's seven "fragments"--since the two that clock in at less than 2:45 are 1:42 and 2:20, the term must refer to structures rather than length--almost as powerful as the "overlong" tracks on Station to Station. "Such a wonderful person/But you got problems" is definitely a love lyric for our time. But most of the movie music on side two is so far from hypnotic that I figure Bowie, rather than Eno, must deserve credit for it. I mean, is Eno really completely fascinated by banality? 

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