David Bowie — Divine Symmetry
Qobuz archival release review (November 2022)
Much in the same way that Conversation Piece and The Width of a Circle expanded (or exhausted, depending on your perspective) the eras of the David Bowie albums they were “complementing” (Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World, respectively), Divine Symmetry is both an explicit companion to Hunky Dory as well as an implicit break with its two box-set predecessors. Whereas Conversation Piece felt like a barrel-scraping endeavor and Width relatively thin, Divine Symmetrymanages to be more substantial and better organized than either. This is almost certainly not by accident, as Hunky Dory is arguably the first “classic” album in Bowie’s catalog and definitely more deserving of such an in-depth approach. Here, an entire disc’s worth of material is given over to demos — including takes on “Waiting for the Man” and “Quicksand” that Bowie put to tape in a San Francisco hotel room — while two others contain Peel sessions and a full 14-song live show from September, 1971. Also included is the entirety of the ultra-rare (500 copies) BOWPROMO promo album, featuring rough mixes of several Hunky Dory tracks as well as a couple of songs (“Bombers,” “It Ain’t Easy”) that were left off the original release, but made their way out later, as well as era-specific alternate and obligatory “2021 alternative mixes.” The sequencing of the set, front-loaded with the material that’s either the most historically interesting (again … Bowie recording “Waiting for the Man” in a hotel room!) or the most dynamically engaging, works in its favor. The four-song run of “Space Oddity”/”Amsterdam”/”The Supermen”/”Oh! You Pretty Things” at the heart of the Aylesbury concert is positively electric, but several other moments — the “Kooks” performance from the Peel session, for instance — are also quite riveting. By the time the alternate material shows up near the end, it’s welcome from a completist perspective, but by that point, even the most steadfast Bowie fan may have tired of hearing the same few songs over and over again. Nonetheless, the set is quite listenable, but more importantly, it accomplishes its mission of illuminating this creatively explosive period in Bowie’s career and sets the series up for future successes.
