How would you rate "Diamond Dogs" (1974) by David Bowie?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Haristar, Jun 23, 2017.

  1. Rne

    Rne weltschmerz

    Location:
    Malaver
    One of David's masterpieces, truly essential.
     
  2. Chrome_Head

    Chrome_Head Planetary Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA.
    Glad to see this album regarded as essential.
     
  3. tkl7

    tkl7 Agent Provocateur

    Location:
    Lewis Center, OH
    I prefer it to Aladdin and Hunky, but don't like it as much as Ziggy. Overall, I think it is essential, but not Bowie's best.
     
  4. California Couple

    California Couple dislike us on facebook

    Location:
    Newport Beach
    I see you got that Scott Walker haircut going on there. Scott was from California, do you think if Scott had done surf music Bowie would have Ventured into surf music too?

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  5. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    Absolute essential classic for me.

    A good friend had his girlfriend, now his wife, stay over for the first time. He used to set his stereo for his alarm. It made her jump when she was woken up suddenly by a very loud

    "...and in the death as the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare"!

    He'd forgotten about that! Luckily she's a big Bowie fan and already loved the album so she was impressed.

    It's one of my most loved Bowie albums.
     
  6. audiotom

    audiotom I can not hear a single sound as you scream

    Location:
    New Orleans La USA
    My first Bowie album

    13 at the time

    It changed my word
     
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  7. oldturkey

    oldturkey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gone away.
    It was a popular haircut in 66/67 - the military jacket was hip too.

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  8. oldturkey

    oldturkey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gone away.
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  9. jon9091

    jon9091 Master Of Reality

    Location:
    Midwest
    Mojo back issue from 2014 still available for $3.99. I got it with the Mojo app.

    [​IMG]
     
  10. CowboyBill

    CowboyBill Forum Resident

    Location:
    Utah
    I love this album. My first introduction to Bowie.
    Sweet Thing/Candidate is amazing to these ears!
     
  11. ampmods

    ampmods Forum Resident

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    To me it is definitely a step down from the Ziggy highs and it's not as wacko as the genius Man Who Sold the World. But it definitely has 2 all time Bowie great songs.

    Diamond Dogs - to me this track is kind of lame. Sort of a re-worked 'Watch that Man' with 1984 implications but not as fresh or exciting.

    Sweet Thing - This one is better in it's live version to me. But overall it's kind of boring.

    Candidate - not bad. The whole Sweet Thing/Candidate thing reminds me of "Width of a Circle" but I like that track much better.

    Rebel Rebel - total classic. One of his best.

    Rock'n'Roll With Me - worst song on the album. Pretty MOR for Bowie.

    We Are The Dead - Probably the greatest album cut here. It's just about a perfect song for Bowie and the themes of the album. It's a beautiful ballad like the stuff he was about to get to from Young Americans but it's as weird as anything from The Man Who Sold the World.

    1984 - It's pretty good. But it's also just seems like a Broadway piece where a bunch of dancers put on a show. It's also really 1974 sounding.

    Big Brother - Also pretty good.

    Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family - meh
     
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  12. oldturkey

    oldturkey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gone away.
    :yikes:
     
  13. DrBeatle

    DrBeatle The Rock and Roll Chemist

    Location:
    Midwest via Boston
    It's long been my favorite Bowie album...just brilliant.
     
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  14. cakeface

    cakeface Forum Resident

    so so album
     
  15. malco49

    malco49 Forum Resident

    Didn't like it for decades. It finally clicked now top 5 Bowie album for me.
     
  16. SonicBob

    SonicBob Forum Resident

    Location:
    West Virginia
    I sorta rediscovered Bowie a couple of years ago before his death and while I'm admittedly no thoroughly seasoned fan, I like Diamond Dogs pretty well in with the title cut and the second half of the album, really great stuff.
     
  17. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Wrote the following regarding Diamond Dogs for the Bowie album-by-album thread here on the forum, so if you've seen it already...


    Diamond Dogs is the first Bowie album I can recall listening to, when I was 5 or 6, and my uncle bought a copy and listened to it incessantly in his bedroom at our house. It scared the s**t out of me, with its Soylent Green era post-apocalyptic landscape, which is certainly something no other pop album has been able to achieve - before or since. That alone merits bonus points. I still get chills when I recall listening to "Future Legend" as a child.

    I bought the Ryko CD in 1995, not long after moving to San Francisco, having spent 27 years growing up in and around Phoenix. I decided to finally build a collection of Bowie CDs beyond Changesbowie, and this sentimental favorite was an obvious starting point. My friend Robyn became a huge Bowie fan during our college years, and had collected most of his work on CD and often talked about it (and even quoted from it in her e-mail signatures on the then-nascent Internet). Since I'd finally completed my Joni Mitchell collection, I figured it was time to concentrate on another favorite artist of mine from that period.

    Diamond Dogs turned out to be the perfect selection. That winter was particularly cold and rainy (for San Francisco) - much gloomier than I was used to, having lived in and around Phoenix my whole life. The radiator in my dank little studio apartment wasn't functioning properly either, making it even more extreme. There was paint over the little vent bulb on the side of the radiator and - having never been around a radiator in my life - I had no idea the paint concealed a tiny vent hole. Unable to vent properly, the radiator provided only an anemic trickle of heat. My apartment was on the second floor at the back of the building, and faced the wall of its six-story neighbor, rendering it a dreary, dingy little dungeon of a room.

    Diamond Dogs fit that decayed urban environment like a glove. I absolutely fell in love with the album all over again, and could now fully appreciate Bowie's sophisticated lyrics. I’ve read contradictory reports over the years, alternately implying that the record was viewed particularly favorably by The Dame himself, or that he considered the album something of a failure, his least successful work. Regardless, I think that "Candidate/Sweet Thing", "We Are The Dead", and "Big Brother / Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family" are, in addition to the hit title track and "Rebel Rebel", some of the finest material he ever recorded. Even the Ryko bonus tracks - the alternate "Candidate" and the wonderful "Dodo" - are striking entries in his catalog. Perhaps it does fail in its attempt to portray 1984 in music, but it's an intriguing and atmospheric attempt. Listening to it still recalls those cold, dark, gloomy winter days for which it became the ultimate soundtrack. That's success enough in my book.

    If Bowie ever held a low opinion of the disc, perhaps it was colored by his inability to secure the rights to do a full treatment of 1984 from Orwell's estate. He crafted the whole Halloween Jack / post-collapse Manhattan atmosphere which dominates the first side of the record (several years before John Carpenter visualized a similar ruined Manhattan in the deliciously pulpy and nihilistic Escape From New York), but maybe he was never satisfied with this compromise to his vision. To me though, those tracks work at least as well as the more overtly 1984-inspired material on the album's flipside, and are solid enough to make me wish Bowie had tackled some kind of stage or film project involving them. But of course, Bowie was rapidly moving away from that sci-fi epic phase of his career, morphing into something even more bizarre - a Teutonic soul brother.

    "Future Legend" paints as grim a post-apocalyptic picture of America as anybody has ever realized. "Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats," is one of Bowie's greatest, most evocative lyrics, and the delivery here is perfection. But it's just one of a blizzard of inspired phrases on the record, starting with the title track's "This ain't rock 'n roll - this is genocide!" and "With your silicone hump and your ten inch stump." The production here is muddier and funkier, although not a million miles removed from the Stones-esque Aladdin Sane. The scratchy, acerbic guitar work is from Bowie himself, and distances the record from the organ-like glam riffs of Mick Ronson. To a degree, it sounds like a prototype for both punk and - even more so - the subsequent alternative movement of the late '80s and 1990's (which it in fact was).

    The "Sweet Thing", "Candidate", "Sweet Thing" suite is next, and it's really like nothing that preceded it in Bowie's catalog. In tone it's closest to the darkness that infests much of The Man Who Sold The World, but sonically it's bizarrely muffled, and musically and lyrically it's a million miles removed from Ziggy, with its avant garde guitar scrawling and Newley-eseque crooning. The shouting proto-rap that concludes "Candidate" also presages the sound of Bowie's vocals on "Heroes" three years hence.

    Bowie wasn't quite finished cribbing attitude from The Stones though, and "Rebel Rebel" is so good it arguably surpasses its inspiration, with perhaps the only opening guitar riff in rock history to equal that of "Satisfaction". The glam attitude is back for a track here as well - it could have comfortably crawled off of Ziggy or Aladdin - lightening the increasingly dark proceedings and giving the record a bonafide chart hit (at least in the UK - Bowie still stalled outside of the Top 40 in the US). And then Bowie's final glam track, "Rock & Roll With Me", a soulful number that, stripped of its guitars, might have fit in on the subsequent Young Americans. It's a solid enough track, but I think it also demonstrates that glam had largely run its course - it's just outclassed by the album's edgier, rougher, more disturbing political material.

    "We Are The Dead" being a prime example of how glam seems like a trifle compared to the meaty, menacing strain of rock Bowie invents on Diamond Dogs. It's theatrical - you can see how this was written around a proposed stage musical - and yet it's far more twisted and surreal than Broadway might have been inclined to tolerate. "It's the theater of financiers, count them, 15 'round the table, white and dressed to kill" Bowie spits out, dripping violence and contempt. "We're dancing where the dogs decay, defecating ecstasy," is yet another stunning construction, possibly the result of the lyric cut up technique Bowie borrowed from Burroughs (which Bowie first employed on "Sweet Thing").

    "1984" - the obviously outlier on Diamond Dogs - was the clearest indication of where he was going, all Shaft-inspired menace, with a soaring, anthemic melody. It's one of those tracks I should probably like more than I do. Not that I don't like it, but it's always felt a bit disjointed, like the parts don't quite fit together the way they want to. On the other hand, that's part of the song's charm. The "come see" bridge and the vocal descent back into the verse however is hair-raising brilliant.

    The album closes as chillingly as it started, first with the militaristic "Big Brother", all ominous honking Bowie sax, operatic backing vocals and rapturous singing from the star. It might be the best vocal performance in Bowie's catalog, and it certainly foreshadows his Berlin-era works. Disturbing to the end, the off-kilter, acoustic guitar backed break in the middle of the track is yet another moment of unique brilliance on this album.

    But then Bowie ups the ante even further with one of the most outre tracks he ever recorded, the percussive freakout of "Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family", a demonic close that almost seems to celebrate the grotesque conclusion of the record, the triumph of an apocalyptic, Orwellian world. There's no uplifting call here from Ziggy, crying out to us, "Give me your hands!" This album concludes on the horrific staccato fadeout of an electronic decay loop, a final descent perhaps into a totalitarian hellscape.

    The Ryko edition throws in a couple of interesting bonus cuts, "Dodo" and the original demo version of "Candidate". "Dodo" has an almost childlike melody and delivery and musically doesn't really fit well with the rest of the album - it almost sounds like something off of Space Oddity or possibly Hunky Dory - although lyrically it's perfectly Orwellian, which makes for an interesting contrast and places it at least thematically with the rest of Diamond Dogs. The demo "Candidate" meanwhile is nothing like the final version and again almost sounds like something from Hunky Dory - it's piano based like much of that record - although with scratching guitars and eerie string-like instrumentation “Candidate” is far darker than anything on Hunky Dory save possibly "The Bewlay Brothers". Like the other tracks on Diamond Dogs though it features cracking political, Orwellian lyrics, such as "Inside every candidate waits a grateful death." Sonically it's out of place in these surroundings, but on its own I think “Candidate” is as good as any other cut on the record, and at over five minutes it's borderline epic, which is impressive for what at first comes across as a shuffling little thing.

    In the wake of Ziggy and Aladdin, Bowie's cult had grown large enough in America to propel Diamond Dogs into the Top 5 on the Billboard albums charts, his first to reach past #17 in the States. It fanned the dying embers of glam there one last time, but before it even hit the streets Bowie had completely moved on. His next record would be the first of several radical transformations over the course of his 50 year career, and while Bowie's soul stylings lost him much of his glam audience, he'd pick up even more fans (especially in America) and inspire awe from many for his ability to so radically adapt his talents to far-flung musical genres.

    He'd also drive straight into his own personal hell, fueled by a diet of cocaine and milk and Hollywood delusions, one that would eventually reshape David Jones as radically as David Bowie had reshaped pop.
     
  18. Leviathan

    Leviathan Forum Resident

    Location:
    461 Ocean Blvd.
    What are the two covers/albums in between Ziggy and Aladdin?
     
  19. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    "Space Oddity" and "The Man Who Sold the World" UK reissues - repackaged with Ziggy era photos.
     
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  20. The Bishop

    The Bishop Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dorset, England.
    An incredible album, and the end of his classic run, for me.

    Sweet Thing, is an outstanding epic and possibly the sleaziest thing Bowie ever did.
     
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  21. jon9091

    jon9091 Master Of Reality

    Location:
    Midwest
    Am I the only one who loves Rock 'n' Roll With Me?
     
  22. strummer101

    strummer101 The insane on occasion aren't without their charms

    Location:
    Lakewood OH
    Nope.
     
  23. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    I liked it a lot when I first heard it, but it was a grower for me, too--it only became my favorite Bowie album quite a bit later.

    However, pretty much all music is a grower for me. And that's one reason why I never pass anything by or stop giving it chances, even if I don't like it that much at first. Almost everything grows on me.
     
    Veni Vidi Vici likes this.
  24. strummer101

    strummer101 The insane on occasion aren't without their charms

    Location:
    Lakewood OH
    I may have been a weird 14-year-old. Music like this, Eno/Roxy Music, Lou Reed, King Crimson, New York Dolls...saved me from the many plodding 70's bands played on the radio that would come to be known as "classic rock".
    :p:angel:
     
  25. oldturkey

    oldturkey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gone away.
    I think it's one of the best tracks on DD (although I can't think of a bad one) - his vocal is top drawer on that track.
     

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