Wow, 2 vastly different reviews/opinions below. i have to say i'm in the middle. While this LP is by no means as bad as "dghkfhldfdhlfa" feels it is it is also not worthy of the huge amount of nonsense "guybahir" feels the need to write about it. Its a good solid effort. Some awesome songs (the title track-disco king-pablo picasso-days) and some less efforts but NONE poor. It grew on me a lot and although i think technically and commercially successfully, HEATHEN is a better album i somehow prefer REALITY. With less "silly songs" and covers REALITY hasnt aged or got boring for me yet. Now THE NEXT DAY has been released i think its safe to say this is a much better effort. Although, don't get me wrong, for a God a short time away from 70, THE NEXT DAY is still admirable and i like it very much. Anyway, REALITY, if you like Bowie, you like this.

(Found this lying around... wrote it when the album came out)Let me start you off with a warning: I am the last person on Earth to take a Bowie recommendation from. I am what you’d probably call a Bowie fanboy; when I saw him live I hit an emotional meltdown as soon as he opened his mouth. Not that I think all Bowie material is on the same level of greatness, some of his work is, infact, pretty bad. But Tin Machine aside - well, let’s just say I love the albums nobody seems to until 20 years after their release, when they suddenly realize that yes, once again, Dave was blissfully walking ahead, whistling his cleverly camouflaged trailblazer tunes to a world populated by deaf mutants.Also, unlike way too many music connoisseurs and other wankers, I think that Bowie’s output of the last 15 years has pretty much been the best in his career, a couple of pre - Let’s Dance albums aside.So I went and finally bought ‘Reality’.Let’s put it this way: imagine the best DJ in the world playing 8 different records at once, divinely mixing them together into one album and then cutting it into tracks and remixing; and then Bowie supplies all the vocals. Ok? No? Ok.Imagine visiting a parallel Earth, and opening the radio. You seem to sort of recognize all the songs you hear, but you also know full well that you’ve never heard them before; besides, the pitch mechanism back at the station seems to have somehow malfunctioned, as none of the songs follow a strictly ‘correct’ harmonic pattern, but they still all make perfect pop sense.See, Bowie recognizes the value of grit and distortion, and here is what he does: he doesn’t get influenced by musicians like the rest of us; being a true pop genius (and - unlike all those instrument-whacking zitfaced morons who make up 99% of any music scene in these sad times - a MUSICIAN), he understands what his favorite people do, and simply assimilates them. Resistance is futile, the Bowrg is here. THEN, you see, he processes them, and out the other end they come, fully Bowieized, to be incorporated into his own material and according to his sensibilities. He is the most convincing form of musical parasite that ever existed, a human sampler, a walking musical collage, and everyone from Your Favorite Crooner through Tricky & Co., Bird, Sting, the Beatles and Angelo Badalamenti to Sonic Youth, Bowie himself and Bowie-only-knows who else, is effortlessly featured in this album - reflected through his internal hall of mirrors.That much being the first stage is obvious.Then, I would imagine, he composes and arranges 20-30 straight pop tunes, cuts them up into pieces like he says he does his lyrics, throws everything into a cylinder-hat, turns it on a table and pastes them back together pretty much accidentally.Having done the basic research, he cleans up the residue and visible seams, plays around with whatever it is he has there, and distorts some of the resulting harmonies so as to not be too confident with the end result. Now that the structure is clear, he’ll insert the lyrics into his musical hybrids and bring it to his (phenomenal) band and producer to play with, and when everyone’s had their fun and the song is recorded, he’ll just create some more internal soundscapes, noise layers and time-machine substructures you can barely notice and plant them in there, carefully layered in order to disorient you just a bit without any real damage to your brain.Yup.So, this is Reality.Seeya.

"He is the most convincing form of musical parasite that ever existed, a human sampler."Yes, that's a good way of describing Bowie's skill: that to create his music, it was essential to interpret other music around him. He's been referred to as a 'chameleon' – insinuating from the viewer’s point of view, that what we see first, with any chameleon-like animal such as Bowie, is not Bowie, but his / our environment (ie, those ‘other’ musical references, new waves relevant for any given period).“THEN, you see, he processes them, and out the other end they come, fully Bowieized, to be incorporated into his own material and according to his sensibilities.”Not Bowie. If Bowie music is a chameleon, Bowie is not Bowie. Whereas many artists look inwards for their creativity; Bowie’s creativity comes from the exterior world around him. The music of Bowie is not intrinsically Bowie, it is more a product of its / our time; but surely some of the result of Bowie’s output, his music, is essentially Bowie (the person). What is that part which is essentially Bowie? (And this question is aimed at the music itself, not Bowie’s appearance, his acting, his marketing and business skills.) Is the essential music part of Bowie, nothing from his soul? Leaving ‘just’ the Bowie voice, his musician’s skill, techniques such as cut up, lyrical abilities based on social satire / story telling, the ability to work with a diverse group of musicians from PSB to NIN and ‘assimilate’? I wouldn’t know the answer to this question – I don’t know Bowie the person, did he ever want us to know him?Often people state Bowie is ahead of his time. The above chameleon stuff can not be empirically true if DB is ahead of his time. If he is ahead of his time, then he is not reflecting the current culture around him, he is not a chameleon, but a musician of vision, futuristic, ahead of his time, original – alien even (a space oddity, Loving the alien – how alien is Bowie in a time when everybody loves aliens?). Perhaps Bowie is so good at picking up on the newest trends that he appears to be the leader. This could be true, he is so consummately skilled at his abilities. So, is he ahead of the times, or A Head of his Times. Where is Bowie in terms of truly original albums? Next Day is not, it is the opposite, self-referential and a deliberate retrospective of his past work – in fact it is the perfect penultimate Bowie record, Blackstar is the perfect ultimate Bowie record. To list contenders for truly original Bowie albums perhaps: the eponymous DB – his first rock album, the Berlin trilogy, Outside and finally Blackstar are good examples of the more ground breaking Bowie albums. However, those records rest well within rock music. They can be inspirational, challenging, sheer works of creative genius; but don’t necessarily redefine music or create new genres. [In contrast: Bauhaus, Can, Kraftwerk, Echo and the Bunnymen, Scott Walker, Cocteau Twins, Velvet Underground, The Cure, Joy Division, cindytalk . . . even now can sound unique.]There are a lot of questions here. Bowie’s range of albums is astounding. People have different favourites and ‘objectively’ claim absolute best Bowie albums rather than personal favourites. I love the Let’s Dance album, some put that album at the bottom. I also love the Outside album (and most in between). Then there are the soundtrack singles, polished and pristine . . . Things went quiet for Bowie some time after Let’s Dance for a couple decades, a long time during which he continued to create fine records: the furore should have been non-stop, I think the problem was there was too much of a musical range to Bowie, a new Bowie release didn’t always appeal to as many people, people didn’t know what they were getting with Bowie anymore, he didn’t fit well into marketing mechanisms. Criticism can be flippant, not always correlating to reality; frankly, Bowie’s abilities testify an ability above those of his critics. Luckily, Bowie’s popularity resurfaced before he died and I ‘suppose’ it’s not odd it occurred with the Next Day album. Bowie left an amazing musical legacy however we make sense of it.