David Bowie - Earthling (Ltd Edition Green vinyl, No 000705 of 2000)
(Music On Vinyl MOVCP815)
Released 2013, Music On Vinyl label, manufactured in Great Britian.
Single album with gatefold sleeve.
 
Track Listing
Side 1
Track 1: Little Wonder - 6.02
Track 2: Looking For Satellites - 5:21
Track 3: Battle For Britain (The Letters) - 4:49
Track 4: Seven Years In Tibet - 6:22
Side 2
Track 5: Dead Man Walking - 6:50
Track 6: Telling Lies - 4:50
Track 7: The Last Thing You Should Do - 4:58
Track 8: I'm Afraid Of Americans - 5:00
Track 9: Law (Earthlings On Fire)
 
Description
Earthling (stylised as EART HL I NG) is the 20th studio album by English recording artist David Bowie. It was originally released in February 1997, on the label Virgin Records, later reissued on BMG Rights Management. The album showcases an electronica-influenced sound partly inspired by the industrial and drum and bass culture of the 1990s. It was the first album Bowie self-produced since his 1974 album Diamond Dogs.
David Bowie returned to the studio five days after finishing up his tour for his previous album, 1. Outside (1995). Bowie said "I really thought it would be great if we could do a photo, almost a sonic photograph of what we were like at that time. So, Reeves, Gabrels and I started writing immediately after we finished on the road." Despite going into the studio with no material ready, the album took only 2 1/2 weeks to record (typical for a Bowie album). Bowie compared this album with his 1980 album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), saying "I think there's quite a link between Scary Monsters and this album, to a certain extent. Certainly, the same intensity of aggression. Bowie described the album as an effort to produce some really dynamic, aggressive-sounding material.
On the production of the drum and bass sound of the album, Bowie said, Unlike most drum and bass things, we didn't just take parts from other people's records and sample them. On the snare drum stuff, Zac Alford went away and did his own loops and worked out all kinds of strange timings and rhythms. Then we speeded those up to your regular 160 beats per minute. That's very much how we treat the album. We kept all sampling in-house and created our own soundscape in a way.
Earthling was the first Bowie album recorded entirely digitally, entirely on hard disk. During interviews promoting the album, Bowie stated "I did nearly everything on the guitar. A lot of screechy-scrawly stuff was done on saxophone, then transferred to sampler, and then distorted and worked on the synthesizer."
Bowie and Gabrels used a technique they'd started while working on Bowie's previous album 1. Outside, where they'd transfer bits of guitar to a sampling keyboard and construct riffs from those pieces. "It's real guitar," said Bowie, "but constructed in a synthetic way. But Brian Eno got in the way - in the nicest possible way - so we didn't get to that until this album. We want to go further with that, because it's a very exciting idea." Bowie considered this album, along with its predecessor, to be a "textural diary" of what the last few years of the millennium felt like.
Bowie's and Gabrels' musical influences at the time had a big impact on the sound of the album: Bowie was influenced by a "euro" sound and bands like the Prodigy, while Gabrels was still into the American industrial sound and bands like Underworld.
Bowie said that he approached the production of this album similarly to how he approached Young Americans (1975), saying, "For Young Americans, I wanted to work within the Philadelphia soul experience, and the only way that I knew was to bring what's thoroughly European about me to this intrinsically black American format. And this album was not a dissimilar situation. It was the hybridizing of the European and the American sensibilities, and for me, that's exciting. That's what I do best. I'm a synthesist.
Bowie summed up the meaning of the songs on the album by saying, "I guess the common ground with all the songs is this abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of gnosticism. I keep going backwards and forwards between the two things, because they mean a lot in my life. I mean, the church doesn't enter into my writing, or my thought; I have no empathy with any organised religions. What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. And that period of time - from today until my demise - is the only thing that fascinates me.
The album's cover features a photograph of Bowie wearing a Union Jack-based coat designed by Alexander McQueen, who had previously designed stage costumes for Bowie and his band. Before the album was released, Bowie considered using Earthlings (plural) for the album's title
 
(information sourced from wikipedia)
Internet Location
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthling_(album)