WERS 88.9 fm Album Review: David Bowie - A Reality Tour

February 5^th, 2009

The most recent David Bowie record, an audio version from his Reality Tour, cleverly titled A Reality Tour, reels you in with the heroic sound of 1974's "Rebel, Rebel." While the song is still great thirty-five years after its release, "Rebel" sounds identical to its studio twin. The tune ends quickly and calmly, Bowie shouts to the crowd that "It's great to be back again [in Dublin, at the Point Theatre,]" and we're led face-first into some 2003 Bowie, the song "New Killer Star," from his album Reality.

Bowie sounds great: tuneful, charismatic, happy, sincere, still feeding to his audience a cocktail of new and old songs with the same energy they had at their original release.

The apparently un-aged rocker cranks out a tight Pixies cover ("Cactus") and drenches his Irish audience in the heavy, electronic liquid that is 1997's "I'm Afraid of Americans," which is excellently placed (for both a live show and live release) in between "Changes" and "Heroes."

Bowie's newer material is scattered throughout the album, but A Reality's emphasis is on the man's greater hits—a resurgent performance of "The Man Who Sold the World," "Life On Mars?" and "Under Pressure," all brought to the stage with healthy vigor as though written yesterday.

Songs written more recently, such as "Slip Away" and "Heathen (The Rays)" are definitive Bowie, whisking listeners into a building ballad followed by an atmospheric landscape reminiscent of his collaborations with Brian Eno, a few of which can be heard on the album.

Standout cuts are the Low-era "Breaking Glass"—fully equipped with the lines, "You're such a wonderful person/ Betcha got problems"—as well as "China Girl," "Sunday" and 1971's "Hang On to Yourself."

Needless to say, much of the material (almost 50%) on A Reality Tour's double disc is from Bowie's 1970s catalog, with newer songs from the 2000s making up the next chunk. Worth mentioning is that this music is taken from a two-night stay in Dublin in 2003, the year his last studio album came out.

-By David Padula