David Bowie
Station to Station [reissue] - EMI
FILTER Grade: 88%

By 1976, David Bowie had discarded Brit-folk, glam, and American funk and set out to create a new form of mutant pop music that crystallized during time spent weirding out in Berlin with Brian Eno. Station to Station is the sound of the newly appointed Thin White Duke on his way to the apocalypse, dressed finely but with his head overly clouded with powders and pills. For all of the talk of Bowie at his most zombified and hollow during this era . . . is there anything darker and funkier than the paranoid disco-strut of “Golden Years”? Additionally, if he was simply the living embodiment of a silver straw at this point, then his vocal performance on “Wild is the Wind” is proof that the Columbian export doesn’t ruin everything it touches. Only “TVC 15” feels the most detached—a mixture of New Orleans piano, riffs, and washes of noise that makes everything feel slightly dislocated. The deluxe edition adds on a pretty stunning display of arena-rock power as his touring band rips through “Changes,” “Five Years” and “The Jean Genie” with a mixture of polished session hands and Bowie’s own grade-A strangeness.