I really dig Heroes. Maybe I like it more than Low, even, because although Low is probably the better record, and was more mind-blowing to me when I first heard it, it’s also a little mannered; whereas on Heroes Bowie exhibits no restraint whatsoever. Even by his standards, the histrionics are sweeping. Songs like “Joe the Lion” and “Blackout” are huge and unhinged in a way that most of his stuff just isn’t.
What I like most about Heroes is that weird schizophrenia it exudes, though that’s also what makes it crumble as an album in the face of something like Low.
Low is pretty depressive, but at least Bowie sounds like he’s more or less holding it together there; despite the thing’s overall lonely vibe, the songs with vocals are tight, economic pop numbers, and are recognizable as such; and the “ambient” stuff on side two is pretty melodic and seems closer stylistically to Eno circa-Another Green World than his actual ambient period.
But then you’ve got Heroes, where all the songs sound like demented improvisations: even the title track, theoretically the big pop song, pretty much consists of a slowly-unfolding drone with an increasingly-agitated Bowie on top. The songs jerk and shudder; compositionally, they’re all over the place.
The singing is spastic and off-kilter, with falsetto backing vocals sometimes coming in seemingly at random, like some bizarro-world parody of the soul vocals in Young Americans. The lyrics are pretty garbled, but have an underlying desperation in them (from “Joe the Lion”: “You get up and sleep / the wind blows on your cheek / the day laughs in your face / guess you’ll buy a gun. . .”).
And then, halfway through, the whole thing dissolves into (much more actually ambient-sounding) ambient. And then you’ve inexplicably got “The Secret Life of Arabia.”
The effect of the album as a whole is. . .well, I was about to say “nightmarish,” but it’s not so much like a nightmare as it is like a weird-ass dream that creeps you out a little. Heroes is not nearly as coherent as Low but I think the case could probably be made for it as Bowie at his most thoroughly-fucked-up.
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