One of David Bowie’s darkest, most theatrical, and most dystopian albums. He sheds the stardust of his Ziggy Stardust era, creating a new persona with the post-apocalyptic paranoia of the early '70s and the decaying street aesthetic of New York: half prophet, half street vagrant, Halloween Jack. This album is a threshold that plunges the glitter of glam rock into mud and reshapes it.
The album actually began with Bowie wanting to make a musical out of George Orwell’s 1984 – when he couldn't get the rights, he twisted the story into his own nightmare universe. The resulting music gave birth to one of Bowie’s most unique worlds. Opening with the ominous whispers of “Future Legend” and segueing into the dirty rock riffs of “Diamond Dogs,” the album begins a theatrical dream in the trilogy “Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise)”;
in “Rebel Rebel,” it reminds us that amidst all this darkness, there's still a glam vein throbbing, danceable and defiant.
During this period, Bowie took on almost all the compositions, production, and instruments himself; the album's grey-concrete atmosphere partly stems from this. The guitar tones are as thick as a garden wall, the vocals echo like an underground club, and the rhythms are metallic and cold, like an analog version of the Blade Runner universe.
Diamond Dogs is a crossroads in Bowie’s artistry: a dark answer to those wondering what would happen after Ziggy's death; and the first cracked, neon-lit stone on the bridge leading to his soul and funk era (Young Americans). Combining a dirty urban dystopia with rock theater, this album is one of the most unique faces of Bowie’s discography — a different street sign with every listen. We have two copies of the rare Turkish pressing in our inventory:
https://thecamelrecords.com/products/david-bowie-diamond-dogs?variant=44444343828619
