David Bowie – 1. Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper Cycle)

One of the least approachable, but most interesting, of later Bowie output. Production by Eno really makes this into a t release, in my opinion. Eno tends to have such a strong influence that it practically makes his productions duets -- Eno as co-creator.
In my opinion, the clearest way to understand this collection of somewhat hodge-podge tunes is to see it as a concept album.
Concept albums probably had their heyday decades ago, so they are hard to evaluate in the current era, but this has all the characteristics. And I believe the artists did contemporaneously describe Outside as such.
The occasional narrated interludes conspire to almost ruin the album. But those kinds of incongruous vignettes are not unexpected for a concept album. Is that a feature or a bug? The interludes presumably act as a glue to hold together the over-arching concept, serving as segues that together disparate musical sentiments whether they want to transition into each other or not. I think these buffering separators, or "diaries" perhaps, help obscure the fact that the narrative of the concept is not really continuous. In other words, if all the songs were put together, they would seem (perhaps typically for Bowie) disted in theme or tone. Put a real zinger of a narrative interlude (Bowie with an effect that transforms him into a kidnapped little girl) in between the songs, and one nearly forgets that the songs before and after don't dovetail together nicely.
Gabrels's guitar is characteristically non-melodic. This adds another dimension of intangibility. The drums are occasionally scalding rhythmically. The piano appears out of nowhere from time to time with virtuoso runs. The lyrics are generally typical late-career Bowie, where it seems most of the words are pulled randomly from a hat, maybe chosen for their sound only. And another feature not atypical of concept albums is a hit tune shoehorned in. The "hit" on the last track does not exactly light my fire, but I wouldn't want to pick out a favorite track out of the remainders because there are several that are really good. Here is the big hit, which you'd hope would be most lyrically intelligible (forgive me if I deviate from what is the accepted lyrics. This is what I hear):
You (repeats 6x)
[I've got] my friends
Now seem so fun 'n frail
Slinky secrets
Hotter than the sun
No peachy prayers
No trendy rechauffé
I'm with you
So I can't go on
All my violence
Raining tears upon the sheets
I'm bewildered
For we're strangers when we meet
Blank screen TV
Preening ourselves in the snow

I could go on...
I think the lyric "Heel head over" could strictly be called poor songwriting.

Though none of the pieces fit together cleanly, they all belong with each other sort of. If this really is a concept album, it's not far off from the worst abuses of the concept albums of decades ago, where the "concept" becomes an excuse to throw together a bunch of disparate pieces, and to try to them off as segments that make up a whole. One gets the sense here of Bowie embracing chaos. A deliberate lack of oeuvre. That can happen when an artist makes a contractual obligation album -- the twin of the concept album.
This is "a hyper cycle" after all, which has got to be at least a small evolution from a concept album. The extended subtitle in the front of the booklet defines this as "A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle," which is the worst kind of hyper cycle. (As is not unusual for discogs) there are a lot of head-scratcher styles listed for Outside. Though "Gothic" in the subtitle is apparently used in another sense here, in my opinion, if you could objectively strip this album's songs out of their context, and play them for a visiting alien, I think they'd call this stuff Goth, or at least in the neighborhood.