The man who sold us the world

First, there is that annoying album cover: “Heroes” defaced by a generic white box atop it, the words “The Next Day” splatted inside in generic Helvetica.

It’s enough to make you reach for the cursor and try to delete the thing. But sexagenarian David Bowie’s on some kind of a comeback trail: he’s got an attention-getting music video with Tilda Swinton, a top-selling art/fashion retrospective (“David Bowie Is”) at Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and this, his first new album in over a decade. So it’s worth investigating what old snaggletooth has to show us today. (Note: with Bowie it’s always “show” us, not tell us. Because we never really turned to Bowie for social pronouncements, à la Dylan; it was always about the latest “show.”)

This is Bowie’s strong suit, in fact: representing the zeitgeist through a series of masterful cloaks and appearances. He did it with his “Hunky Dory”/”Ziggy Stardust” phase, taking bits of Marc Bolan’s pixie dust T.Rex glam, and a sprinkle of Roxy Music’s lounge lizard romanticism, and maybe some Michel Chapman electric folk (pilfering key guitarist Mick Ronson in the process); then he became The Thin White Duke, a spaceman in sharp threads for The Man Who Fell To Earth, and a cocaine casualty. He cooled out after that with a trilogy of Eno-produced albums, finding a Krautrock connection and helping old buddy Iggy Pop relocate his mojo in the process.

Those were the early highlights. A decade of ‘80s video pop (“Let’s Dance” signaling a shift to planned obsolescence) led to periods of silence, critical slams, and cultural irrelevance. No more zeitgeist-spotting for him. It turns out, today, young people mostly know Bowie from his sporadic ‘00s albums, and a couple of hipster covers (The Killers massacring Heroes, for instance). And maybe Flight of the Conchords’ loving parody, Bowie’s in Space.

“The Next Day” isn’t the Second Coming. (Or the Third. Or the Fourth.) It’s not going to reinvent Bowie for the Next Generation. These are songs, some of them stronger than others. There’s no concept (thank God). The sound channels at once the sleek sonic sheen of “Heroes” and “Low,” the lopsided lilt of “Lodger,” and some of the rhythmic adaptations of 2002 and ‘03’s “Heathen” and “Reality.” To be honest, Bowie’s importance for me belongs to a period in the past: one roughly covering 1971 to 1979. He was a clever, inventive songwriter, for starters. After that — after a thousand Bowie imitators became the New Romantics of the ‘80s and people started retroactively digging Bowie’s early chameleon shifts — his actual fingerprint on the musical map seemed less important.

But that’s perhaps the point. Like the divas he spawned — Madonna, Lady Gaga, even Bono — the Pop Star, post-Bowie, became larger than a mere album, or an onstage persona: he/she became a brand. The music itself was only part of the whole tentpole show.

“The Next Day” opens with the title track — a slight reggae gallop in the upstroked guitar, which kind of squonks like Beauty and the Beast from 1978’s “Heroes” but mostly features the singer complaining he’s “not quite dying, my body left to rot in a hollow tree.” What are we to make of that? Growing old can be a drag sometimes. David Torn’s guitar solo is attention-getting and cool, yet seems like a reflection of past Bowie glories rather than new axe-slinging territory.

Bowie’s sound has always pivoted on his lead guitarist — the guitar man is his foil, whether it’s Ronson ripping off a 10-minute solo for Moonage Daydream, Stevie Ray Vaughan adding bluesy licks to Let’s Dance or Robert Fripp racing all over “Scary Monsters.” Here, he relies on an old hand (Earl Slick) and seasoned axeman David Torn (who worked with Bowie on “Heathen” and “Reality” and everyone from David Sylvian to Jeff Beck). Torn’s atonal squalls on Dancing Out in Space are noteworthy.

The next song of note is the second single, The Stars (Are Out Tonight). This, too, sounds like wishful thinking: that stars have eternal significance, not just fleeting 15-minute periods of fame. Underneath its pop aspirations, there’s a yearning, elegiac quality to this song, like Bowie’s actually concerned about the wellbeing of celebs. Could just be the minor chords, though.

Where Are We Now is a fairly lush, piano-driven ballad, and its specific placement in Berlin (with references to Potsdamer Platz) gives it a bookend feel, like it’s commenting on the past, when he was recording those landmark albums at Hansa Studios long ago.

Skip to Valentine’s Day, which has a glam-stomp approach not unlike Morrissey at times, and features Slick’s retro-‘50s power chords. There is a general retro-future/‘50s vibe (crooning backup vocals, for instance) to “The Next Day,” and you begin to realize that a lot of Bowie’s emotional range might have come from his past, the doo-wop singers he no doubt grew up listening to.

Next up, If You Can See Me takes off with the kind of pan-global rhythmic shifts that marked songs like African Night Flight from 1979’s “Lodger” — a sound that mutated, a dozen years later, into drum ‘n’ bass. Now, unfortunately, it can sound commonplace. This is followed by I’d Rather Be High, ostensibly about troops coping in a Middle Eastern desert by lighting up. Then there’s Boss of Me — a slice of domestic life about a guy who’s ruled by his lady love.

At this point, about halfway through “The Next Day,” you kind of wish Bowie had chosen not to paint with such a miniaturist’s brush. The songs are fairly short, yet some seem to go on forever. You kind of pine for the airy instrumentals that supplied breathing space to “Heroes” and “Low.” The singer has, in recent years, sought out his previous artistic collaborators — working again with Eno and Earl Slick. Here he reunites with longtime producer Tony Visconti who recorded Bowie’s most “classic” albums and perhaps is best suited to bring out the “truth” beyond the singer’s seemingly limitless capacity for posing. So “The Next Day” curiously sounds like a classic Bowie album — but it probably isn’t.