It’s like Halloween Time… Part 1

In honor of my favorite holiday (well, can Halloween really be considered a “holy day”…?) I’m gonna try and throw up some appropriately “themed” stuff to (hopefully) sit alongside more proper entries. (I swear there are more coming, I’m just being lazy with the finishing touches.)

We’ll start things off with a little something from one of my favorite Bowie albums, Diamond Dogs. In the building swell of Bowie’s critical and creative '70s peak, this album is a somewhat regarded and yet lost gem tucked amongst the uber hype of Ziggy, Aladdin and the Berlin trio, etc (well, everyone overlooks Lodger too, but…). That’s a shame ‘cos Diamond Dogs, another concept album loosely based - due to legal hassles with the Orwell estate - on 1984, is a morbidly danceable (er, dance of the dead?) glam era romp into mankind’s very bleak future, with Ziggy being replaced by a similarly stylized Halloween Jack and Bowie’s croon reminiscent of his former self while pointing towards the Philly Soul and the Thin White Duke eras he would soon embrace.

Though most all the album oozes with post-world creepiness, the understated yet standout track for me is neatly tucked away in the middle of side two - the grimly titled but poignant We Are the Dead, depicting the inevitable and accepted demise of captive humanity through the eyes of the album’s hero (or at least that’s how I see it). This is a song that haunts in its simplistic chant of the title refrain and has me glancing over my shoulder into shadowed corners at every creak and squeak.

Boo!