Much as
Low and
Lodger reflected David Bowie's surroundings in Berlin,
Reality follows 2002's
Heathen in documenting the singer's settling into adulthood -- if not altogether into middle age -- as a New Yorker and a family man. Relatively spare in construct and dominated by straight-ahead guitar songs, the disc has its moments of melancholy ("Fall Dog Bombs the Moon") and warm contentment (the spangly "Days of My Life"), all of which seem connected by Bowie's desire to present himself, in contrast to his persona-hopping of past decades, as just a regular guy. For the most part, he's successful in doing just that: The ballad "The Loneliest Guy in the World" (not nearly as morose a tune as the title suggests) is as open as anything he's ever done, while the wispy "New Killer Star" (a musing on September 11th) reveals a surprisingly empathetic streak. Dating back to his earliest days, documented on
Pin-Ups, Bowie's had a knack for cleverly choosing cover songs and smartly refashioning them in his own image. Here, the singer revamps a pair of distinctly different ditties, cloaking
Jonathan Richman's snotty, postadolescent plaint "Pablo Picasso" in cocked-eyebrow detachment and then peeling back that attitude for a spare version of
George Harrison's "Try Some Buy Some." Think of
Reality as a portrait -- or, more accurately, a short film -- of an artist still finding himself after all these years.
